Sunday, June 16, 2002

Weird justice
I thought I had a handle on how law works, but I confess I'm confused now.

There's this guy who's been surreptitiously pointing his video camera up womens' skirts, and selling the video -- and they can't figure out if he's breaking any laws. Well, more precisely, they can't prosecute him if they can't identify a victim. Perhaps the guy who does the "Girls Gone Wild" videos could have saved himself some trouble. It's not like people are buying the videos to see the girls' faces.

Somewhat less trivially, Arthur Andersen is guilty. Nobody in particular, just the company. Can you do that? I thought you were supposed to, like, try a specific defendant in criminal court. You can sue a company, but can you find a company guilty of a crime? Well, I guess you can, they just did. I'm a little uneasy with it, though: It implies that penance extracted from a company doesn't affect any innocent people, and that's far from proven.

No comments: