> what is legal or not is best left to those with a background and education in the legal profession
Tangent, but I just want everyone to recognize how obscenely absurd this (largely true) sentence is. How are we, the vast bulk of non-law-school-graduates, supposed to follow the law in our day to day lives if just figuring out what's legal literally requires multiple college degrees?
Many people posting on the internet have this strange idea that American law is opaque and difficult to understand, but in general it's actually pretty accessible. If you can read software, you can read American legal documents.
The reason lawyers get paid so much is that if you're doing something that is right on the boundary[0] then the difference between legal and illegal might be extremely fuzzy, and also worth a lot of money, so it's worth paying someone $1000 an hour to write a long brief in your local judge's preferred WordPerfect template about why what you're doing is OK.
On the other hand, the SEC website linked by OP just has a checklist of Accredited Investor qualifications, and it's possible to read them. Do you have a salary of $300,000? You qualify. Did you make $195,000? Well, that's less than $200,000 so unless one of the other checkboxes matches, you're out of luck[1].
[0] Maybe it's illegal by the letter of the law but you think it shouldn't be, like ride-sharing in locations with taxi regulations. Or maybe it's not illegal but might be viewed with extreme skepticism by regulators, like offering a non-fraudy Bitcoin exchange. In both of those cases, there's an easy solution (just don't do the maybe-illegal thing) that is accessible to the layman.
[1] Maybe you can hire a lawyer and/or CPA to get your $6000 of undeclared dog-walking income counted for the purposes of Accredited Investor qualification, but is it really worth the hassle?
This isn’t really true. The law as written might be easily understood by reading it. But that is not the entire story.
The US has multiple forms of law, Legislative Law, as ratified by the Legislative Body. Then Case Law which is law introduced by Judicial courts which may or may not invalidate, expand, or change the legislative law. The US also has courts under specific bodies such as the EPA.
Lawyers exist to be able to tell you “the law says x, however the most common case law actually says Y.” In terms of investor, patent, and IP law this is SIGNIFICANT. You could be violating the investment laws enacted by the legislature; but it could be entirely legal because a court in your district invalidated that law. However, you fly to New York, a different district, and it’s illegal again.
Determining what is legal and what is illegal can be exceptionally difficult. Because the layman doesn’t have access to the thousand dollar monthly subscription of LexusNexus to do case law searches. They probably don’t even know that this exists.
Another example - California has a law on the books that states that you’re not allowed to own batons and nunchucks….. Except in Yuba County, where a Judge has thrown out the law via a court case, and the DA never appealed the ruling. But if you’re arrested by the CHP, instead of the Sheriff they can try you in State Court, and it applies again.
I think you're reinforcing my point, not disagreeing with it.
You cite examples where the law forbids something, but a judicial opinion allows it. So one easy way to avoid doing something illegal in all of your examples is to simply follow the law as written.
Sure, maybe with legal counsel you could push things a little further, get your nunchuck possession charge dismissed because you were pulled over two hundred yards past the Yuba county line or whatever, but that's different from someone who wants to avoid getting in trouble in the first place.
You're assuming the rules you need to follow are a superset of the plain text of the law as written. This is incorrect.
One example: assault with a deadly weapon. The definition of "deadly weapon" various wildly in different jurisdictions and isn't always clear simply from the case law. In some jurisdictions it means any weapon theoretically capable of being deadly, so slapping someone with a flip-flop (real example) could count.
You're focused on some extremely narrow view that's right on the legal/illegal boundary and thinking that's the whole world.
The easiest way to not go to jail for assault with a deadly weapon is to not assault people. It is very easy to follow this guideline, and the success rate is quite high (most people in the world are not currently in jail).
If you absolutely must assault someone, and you decide to use a weapon, then yes, you will likely want to hire a lawyer to write a bunch of carefully-argued pages about why you shouldn't go to jail.
But it's not like you would just be walking down the street, knocking people out with a tire-iron as one does, and then get ambushed by the complexities of the law.
You're mostly right. Bringing up tire irons is unfair when I explicitly mentioned things like flip-flops.
I think a better example might be peaceful protest. Sure you can just not do that, but a reasonable person might want to protest. Here's another example: police officer tells you can march across bridge, then arrests you for obstructing traffic. You intuitively think this sounds like entrapment. It isn't.
>But it's not like you would just be walking down the street, knocking people out with a tire-iron as one does, and then get ambushed by the complexities of the law.
I want to take a second to say how much I appreciated this line.
My dude, I'm an American who has done research to try to find out what's legal or even what the requirements are for some things. I know from experience that it's a mess.
I don't consider "just stay away from the boundary" to be an adequate answer. Avoiding a vaguely defined zone of peril is not freedom. And as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen of a democracy, the law is supposed to work for me, to make my life better. Instead it works for those willing to casually break the law, and makes those rich enough to hire lawyers rich enough. If that doesn't sound like a problem to you, I don't know what else to say.
Tangent, but I just want everyone to recognize how obscenely absurd this (largely true) sentence is. How are we, the vast bulk of non-law-school-graduates, supposed to follow the law in our day to day lives if just figuring out what's legal literally requires multiple college degrees?