 Okay, just pass them out. Hello everybody. Hello. Ready to start? Thank you for coming. Yes. Ready. Sure. And I wanted to... First of all, this is Mr. Cancelo. Hello. I'm going to talk to you about the topic of law. Yes. Yes. And thank you. This looks wonderfully organized. They are very curious and they will have questions. When would be the best time for them to ask the question? I think they can interrupt me any time. If I say something that's confusing or if you have a question, feel free to interrupt me. Just raise your hand and I'll stop and answer it. You're not able to get through your material? Mm-hmm. How will you let them know? I'll let them know. I think we can. And if not, I have a convenient stopping point. So it shouldn't be a problem. All right. It sounds great. It sounds like we've just got a plan. And for the people who are curious, I also would like you to do this. Think about the needs of the group. And possibly, is there anybody that would like to get through all of this? Because you'd like to learn everything that you can that he has to offer? Okay. I think that'd be great. All right. Thank you for coming. Okay. So I'm Mr. Kinsella. I'm Ethan's dad. Most of you guys know me from Camp Champions. And do you have a question? I may not have printed out enough, but I hope I did. How many more do I need to get? They're not essential. You guys can borrow them. That's just kind of an outline of what we're going to discuss today. And you can make them later. You don't really need it for my lecture. You can just listen. Okay. Any other questions? Okay. So I'm a lawyer and I am also interested in lots of topics like legal theory and other things. I went to Camp Champions and Mrs. Nickerson and I had a lot of talks. And she realized that I had a lot of interest in certain ideas. And so she thought this would be a good topic to speak about. Because it's always good to get someone who speaks about something who's very interested in it, right? A lot of you have hobbies and interests outside of school, right? That you're really interested in, right? Anyone know here the difference between an application and a vocation? What's a vocation? Anyone know? Anyone? It's a job, right? That's your job. And an application is like your hobby. Most people have interests outside of their job. So I'm a lawyer, but I'm also personally interested in history, legal theory, political theory. So I studied a lot of this on my own and I still do. I talk to other people about it, students, usually older students. And so that's one reason I've had this interest. And what I've learned is not really what I learned in law school. I learned it on my own. I didn't learn most of this in law school. So it's something I wish I'd learned early on or at least in law school, but I didn't. So I'm going to try to give you guys some pointers about what we're going to be talking about, okay? So what interests me is the idea of law and what law is and how it came to be and what the way law works in today's world, okay? So before we start talking about that, can anyone, who can jump up and jump down really quickly? Just some one person. Jump up for me. Someone jump up. Okay. What happened when you jumped up, Ethan? And what happened when you jumped up? Did you hit the ceiling? What happened? You came back down, right? Why did you come back down? What happened? What pulled you back down? So has anyone ever heard of the law of gravity? Is that the same thing as like the law against theft or murder? No. But we call it a law, right? Right. Has anyone ever heard of economics? Yes. Okay. Can someone give me anything they know about economics? Anyone? You. Business. That's right. Business has to do with trading and making money, right? Let me ask you guys a question. Suppose I'm selling a glass of water for a dollar, okay? At a hot picnic, okay? At the post oak field day, let's say. And let's say there's only one glass of water there. Can I sell it for more than I could if there was a bunch of water? Anyone? Are you sure? Yes. Correct. So that's the law of supply and demand. So that's another type of law. That's an economic law. Those kind of laws, the laws of physics like gravity and the laws of economics are what we call descriptive laws. We're just trying to describe the way things work. We're saying that if this happens, then this is going to happen. If you jump up, you're going to fall down because of the law of gravity, right? Or if you have a greater supply of something to sell it in the economy, you have to sell it for a lower price. Or if something is more demanded, you can sell it for a higher price. That's the law of supply and demand. Now, there are other types of ways we use the word law. Can anyone tell me, is it good or bad to be dishonest? Are you sure? Bad. So some people call that a moral law. Like they say, the moral laws say that we should be honest. We should be patient. We should be kind. We should be courteous. We should be respectful. So these kinds of laws are not descriptive. They're prescriptive. Anyone ever heard of prescription? Like when you have a medical prescription? Yes, Ethan? I have. Go ahead. What's your example? Right. Prescription drugs. So that means that doctors prescribing it to you tells you you should do this. So sometimes the laws like moral laws tell you what you should do. Those are called prescriptive. But they only tell you what you should do. And if you don't do it, there's really no penalty except that you're kind of a bad person. Right? Everybody understand that? Now, there's another type of law which we're going to talk about today. And we can call that legal law or legal rules. And this is what most people think of when they use the word law. For example, if you say it's against the law to do what? Anyone give an example? Gerard? What's it against the law to do? To sell drugs. To sell drugs. That's right. Now, that's against the law because the government has said if you do that, then you're going to be in trouble. Right? So this is not just a should, it's what we call a must. In other words, you should be polite, but you must obey the other kind of law. And if you don't, there's going to be a penalty imposed by the law. Yes, Sammy, what's up? Right? Robbing a bank, stealing from someone. Yes? Narcotics. Narcotics, that's correct. There's a lot of those that are illegal. Yes? Man slaughter. Man slaughter, which is killing someone without a good reason, that's correct. So those are all examples of legal rules which are enforced by law. Now I brought a few pictures here. I'm going to leave these when I go. This is an example. Anyone know what this is? Ayush? This is the law of gravity app. Yeah, this is the idea that Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree and he saw the apple fall and he came up with the law of gravity. So that's the first kind of law, physical law, right? A causal law or a descriptive law. Now, we talk about the laws of society, legal rules that help us get along with each other, right? So this is an illustration of the principle behind that. Anyone ever seen this before? Yes. Nathan? Yes. What do you think that is? There's a scale. What's the scale called, by the way, in the horoscope? Anyone know the horoscope for October? Sammy, go ahead. Libra. And what's the symbol for pound, by the way? Anyone know the symbol for pound? Lady? Get it? From Libra? So the scale means pounds or weight. So this is called Lady Justice. In Greek, yes, Ethan? That's right. In Greek mythology, she's called Themis. Sometimes we call her Lady Justice and she has other names too, Justicia, etc. So she has three features on her. So she represents law and justice. Can anyone see what the three features she has? We have the scale. That's one feature. The sword and the blindfold. Those three things represent three things that are important to law. Who can tell me what the reason for the sword is? Sammy? Enforcing it. That's right. That means it's not just a should, like we talked about earlier. It's a must. And if you don't listen to this law, then the government or the legal system will use the sword to enforce the law. So the sword is part of it. What about the blindfold? Who can think of what the reason for the blindfold is? That's okay. Impartiality? Impartiality? Everyone's going to be treated equally. The judge has to be fair. They can't be partial to one side or the other. So if you're the judge and your brother-in-law comes into court and some stranger comes into court, the brother-in-law is at a disadvantage, right? Because you're going to rule against them or maybe the other way around. But anyway, you have to be impartial, okay? And then finally the balance means justice or just you have to balance the competing interests of the parties before you. So that's the key elements of law. Impartiality, right? That's what the blindfold means. So you guys will see statues like this all over the world in front of courthouses and other places. Sometimes they don't put the blindfold on. I don't know why. I think it makes a better statue. Okay? So this is Lady Justice or Themis. Okay? Now, so let's talk about law here. Today we're very used to the modern western world legal systems. So most of you probably think of law as something that the government branch writes down and says this is the law, right? It's written down. Now, in the western legal systems in America, in Europe, what are the three branches of government? Anyone, can anyone tell me the three branches of government? Amy? Legislative. Yeah, Anna? Executive. So legislative, executive and judicial. Legislative branch means the group that makes the laws, right? They write down laws. The executive is the president, for example. They enforce the laws and the courts interpret the laws. That's a judicial branch, okay? So that's our three branches. So nowadays we are used to thinking of law as a set of rules that the government branch that makes the laws, the legislature, or the Congress, in the case of the federal government, writes down. Everybody understand that? So, but this is not how law started and this is not what all of law is. Can anyone tell me what do you think the, when do you think law started? What was like one of the first laws we ever had in human history? Just take a guess. Ethan? A lot of cavemen killed each other? Do you think they had an advanced legal system back in cavemen times? Probably not. Probably not. Liam? Yes, right. Don't hurt other people. Don't hurt them. Don't steal from them. Don't hit them, right? That's probably some of the earliest laws. Now, do you think that those became laws because there was a government legislature that issued a rule that says, we're going to decide today that it's bad to kill people and hurt them? Do you think that's how it happened? Or do you think it's the other way around, maybe? Maybe people knew this already, right? They knew that's how we had to get along. And this became a custom or a practice, right? So the ancient legal systems in world history started this way. There were customs and traditions in just a common sense way of people getting along with each other. And they took these ideas and they called them laws. Now, they would write them down sometimes, but they would write them down just to remind people, but that's not how they created them. They were created by people's common sense of morality and justice. So if we go back in history, this is a picture of what's called Hammurabi's Code. This is a picture of Hammurabi back in the Babylonian times. This is, oh, this is thousands of years ago, one of the earliest code. This is King Hammurabi writing down some of the legal provisions everyone had agreed upon back in those days, okay? This is some of the origins of law. Now, it wasn't legislated. Really, it was just written down to keep track of it, okay? This is another picture of Hammurabi's Code. We've actually found copies of this. That's how we know about this. But we've lost a lot of them because it was hard to write things down and preserve them, okay? Who else can think of another kind of written code of laws and things we shouldn't do? Go ahead, Ethan. Magna Carta. Magna Carta. What about a little bit earlier than that? Yes? U.S. Commandments. The Ten Commandments, right. So here we have the Ten Commandments being received and passed down, right? So that's another example. And we're not really clear when exactly this happened, but it's probably about 2,500 years ago, something like that, way before the modern era. Yes? No, nothing, okay? Then we do have the Magna Carta. Has anyone here... Didn't you guys take a field trip to see the Magna Carta recently? No. No, you didn't? You're going to. Okay. And some of you have seen it, right? Yes. You and Ashwin saw it. Magna Carta is a Latin. Does anyone know what it means in English, Magna Carta? Just say it. You say it, you get a bragging point. What does Magna mean? Anyone know what Magna means? Think of the word Magnificent or Magnum. Yeah, Liam, what do you think? Yeah, great. The great... Yes, Ethan? Great charter. Great charter, right? It was the great charter of rights. So this is one of the earliest codifications of law too. This is around, I think it's in the year 1,000. King John and a lot of these English guys had to agree on these rights. So this is some of the earlier codifications of law. Okay? Yeah? Yeah, I'm going to pass these out because I'm done with them actually. So you guys can pass them out and just take a look at them. Good idea. Good idea. Now, in America, one of the most important early documents, of course, is our Constitution, right? Right here. This is a U.S. Constitution. And it embodied a lot of principles developed in England and in the Magna Carta earlier on. So this is another statement of law. It's getting kind of like legislation now because the government body wrote it, but they were sort of restating what people had already figured out on their own. Okay? There you go. Okay? Now, in today's world, there are two major legal systems. Now, we live in America. So we live under a variety of legal systems here in this country, but we live under the American legal system. Can anyone guess where the American legal system came from? Which country's laws influenced America's legal system? Liam? Actually, English, right? So England was the country we came from, right? So the English common law system was one of the world's major legal systems. And so in America, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all the Commonwealth countries, they pretty much have a common law system like England had. And I'll tell you guys about that in a minute. Okay? The rest of the world in Europe has more of what they call a civil law system. Okay? So let me tell you guys how this started. And this took me a long time to figure out. No one explained this correctly in law school to me. Okay? If you go back in time, I just went through some of the early major legal systems. The greatest early major legal system was based in, can anyone guess which city or which country? Andreas? Not Australia. Close? No. Very far off. But good guess. Yes, Ayush? London, England? That's the second one I'm going to get to. I'm talking about one a little bit earlier than that. I'm talking about the legal system that was about 2,500 years ago to about 1,500 years ago, from about 500 BC to about 500 AD. Yes? China? China actually did have one, but it has not really become a major world legal system in the western world. But yes, they actually had one. James? I'm not familiar with that one. What's that one? That's probably one I'm leaving out. But no, I'm thinking of the Roman law. Okay? Ancient Roman Empire, the Republic of Rome, had the greatest legal system the world has probably ever seen. It lasted for 1,000 years and they developed all kinds of great things. And does anyone know one of the famous emperors of the Roman Empire? Julius Caesar? Well, Caesar's going to play into what I'm talking about shortly, but I'm thinking of another emperor. Has it to do with the word justice almost? Ayush? No, he wasn't good and I'm not thinking of Nero. There's a guy named Justinian. Anyone heard of the emperor Justinian? Yes. If you have any friends named Justin, guess who they're named after? Justinian. Justinian, right? So what Justinian did was he had all these great legal geniuses for about a five, 600 year period that developed this massive body of Roman law. Very systematic, very refined, very impressive, still being used today, like in Louisiana, where I'm from. And Justinian got some of his greatest geniuses to codify and to write down what had been done for the previous centuries. If he hadn't done that, we would have lost it. It was lost for a few centuries after the Dark Ages, after Rome fell, but it was rediscovered later and it has influenced all the legal systems of the world. So the Roman system is one of the big two legal systems in the world. Yes, Anna? Well, so the two biggest ones would be the Roman law from about 2,500 to about 1,500 years ago. And the other one is the English common law. It started about 1,000 years ago. Those are the two big legal systems. And they are both systems, what they have in common is they're not based upon legislation. In other words, the bulk of the law, the legal rules that people had to follow weren't announced by the legislature. They were found by judges in disputes between people. This is the difference between how we're doing law nowadays primarily and how law used to be done. It was done, two people have a dispute. They're fighting over who owns a sheep, right? So they go to the judge, in Rome they were called the jurist consults. It means legal experts. And in the English common law they go to a judge, some kind of judge, okay? And they say, listen, which one of us owns this sheep? I think I own it, he thinks he owns it. And the judge looks at it, he balances the scales, he has impartiality and then his decision stands, he uses the sword to enforce it metaphorically. And so when he finds, he makes a decision, who owns the sheep? He has to come up with a reason for it. That reason becomes a legal rule that other courts later on rely upon. So over time, the law gradually gets more sophisticated and more developed and people can predict their actions better. They can get along with each other better. They know who's going to own things. And if the law becomes established, let's say you and I have a dispute over who owns a sheep. Well, we sort of know what the law is going to be. So we don't even need to go to court because it would be a waste of everyone's time. So that actually saves time. I'm going to pass this out to you. This is the digest of Justinian, one of the things that Justinian helped to codify, okay? Now, Anna, you asked about other major legal systems. So those are the two major legal systems dominant today, but there are other legal systems. One would be Jewish law, which is very well developed, has been discussed for thousands of years by Jewish scholars and rabbis. There's Islamic law, also known as Sharia, which is still in force in some Arabian and Muslim countries. Yes? Okay. There was a really well-developed body of law among the merchants, the people who traded about 1,000 years ago in the medieval period called the law merchant or the lexmercatoria. We also have international law, which is still in force today. That's the law between countries, like when it's okay to go to war, you can go to war, how treaties between countries are supposed to be respected. Yes, Andreas? Canon law is, now notice that's spelled canon with one in. That has nothing to do with cannons like during a war. A canon with one in means a body of rules of a given belief system, okay? So who, I think I have it written down there. The canon law was the law of the Catholic Church, which developed over the last 2,000 years as well. So that's another well-developed body of rules. And because the Catholic Church was part of the government of Europe for several centuries, it sort of was mixed in with the law of the countries as well. That's why it's also important. It's less important today as a legal system. So those are the major legal systems. Now, to tie into your play, which was great by the way, you guys mentioned two things that caught my eye. One was Napoleon, right? The other was a Louisiana Purchase, and the other was a guy named Robert Livingston, right? Now, the relevance of that to what we're talking about today is that Napoleon did something similar to what the Emperor Justinian did. Remember what Emperor Justinian did? He codified the Roman law that had been developing for hundreds of years. After that, as I said, Rome fell around 500 AD. We went to the Dark Ages for a while. The Roman law was lost. It was later rediscovered because Justinian had the foresight to have it codified. It was found later in various libraries. So this Roman law started being reintroduced all across Europe, except for England, which had its own system. So France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, all these countries started using the Roman law and the digest of Justinian, developing their own traditions, and they had their own European legal system. So what Napoleon did, he said, this is getting out of hand. We need to codify it. So he hired a bunch of, or he appointed a bunch of legal experts, and they codified what they call the civil law or the continental law in Europe. It was similar to what Justinian did, but he did an even better job of it then. So the first modern scientific legal system or legal code was called the Code Napoleon. I think it was 1804, right around the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Now, at that time, the state of Louisiana wasn't a state yet, but it was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which you guys just learned about, right? It was governed by the French, and then it was governed by the Spanish, and then it was governed by the French again right before they sold it to the U.S., right? So at the time that Louisiana territory was sold to the U.S., all the inhabitants had been governed by the Code Napoleon and Roman law and civil law, unlike the rest of the U.S., which was English-based and common law. And so the U.S. had to make a decision. What do we do about Louisiana? It's a weird bird. It's a weird state. They have a lot of weird traditions. A lot of them speak French. They don't speak English. So the citizens wanted to keep their Code Napoleon. They wanted to keep their Napoleonic code, their civil code. So the government, the people that advocated for that won that fight, and that's why even today, 200 years later, Louisiana still has a civil code. And it's a pretty impressive thing to read. I think it's fascinating. There are other parts of the world that are sort of like that. Most of Canada is a common law country because they came from England, yes, Ethan? And so Quebec is one of their, what, ten provinces? How many provinces does Canada have? Ten, twelve, something like that? So Quebec is the one French-speaking and civil law province of Canada, sort of like Louisiana is in America. So if you're a lawyer or if you're a businessman doing a lot of deals in Texas or Louisiana, you'll quite often hear, here's the rule in Texas, here's the rule in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, everything's different because they just sort of know it's based on this Napoleonic code. So for example, in Texas, has anyone ever heard of a, who knows what real estate is? What is it? You? Right. We call that real property. It's a house and it's the land that the house is on. We call that realty or real property. Doesn't sound right to our ears because we think it's either real or not real, but in law real means a thing, a rest, R-E-S, okay? So that's where the word real comes about. What's the other type of property? Can you think of something other than land? Yes, you? Your car. Your car, that's right. What's the difference between a piece of land and a car? That's right. The car can move and the land can't move. And in fact, in the civil law, instead of calling the land a real property and the car personal property, we call, the civil law calls land immovable and they call the car movable. So everything is either movable or not movable, right? So that's one difference, but it's more of a term, it's more of a way we use words to describe it. It's the same idea, but they use different concepts or terms, okay? So those are some of the differences between the civil law and the common law. Now, if you ask a typical lawyer today, what's the main difference between the civil law, which is the law in most of Europe, and the common law, which is the United States and Canada and England, what would the differences be? They would say, well, the civil law is based upon legislation and the common law is based upon court decisions. But that's actually not quite right, because if you remember the history of this, the civil law was a codification by Napoleon. Codification means you codify things, you make it into a code. So you look at all the legal cases that have been decided, all the practices, and you come up with a written description of it, sort of like Hammurabi's code. You're not making the law, you're just writing it down so people can read it and understand it, okay? So the civil law in Europe came from the Roman law, and the American and the British common law came from their English common law. They both came about from this original way of making law, which was judges deciding cases, okay? Now, what has changed is that nowadays there are more and more laws created by legislatures. So more and more the common law is being reduced to a smaller role, and the legislative role is being made higher. Now, does anyone have any questions at this point? That's pretty high level legal theory, by the way. So if anyone gets half of this, that's pretty good. Any questions right now? Any observations or insights? Anyone? Ethan? So based like the U.S. system we have now? Yes, except in the U.S. system we have the legislatures in all the states, and we have the Congress which writes statutes or legislation all the time, which are not the common law ways. So we have more and more laws being made by legislation, but the basic underlying principles came about from common law. And there's one other little nuance here, which I think is interesting, but it's hard to understand. The civil code of like Louisiana and of Nicode Napoleon in the very first article says, the supreme source of law is the legislature. So what they did was they took a bunch of legal principles that had been developed by courts, and then they wrote them down, and then the legislature said, now this is the law, and they stamped it with their approval. So they sort of did a blend, right? They wanted to say that the legislature is a supreme source of law, but the law they enacted was what the courts had come up with. I don't think so. No, he came up with the first scientific modern code. Before then they just followed the sort of customary law that was in place in Europe, which was largely the Roman law and the codification of Justinian, but there wasn't really a code before that. Some other countries came up with their own codes. Spain came up with their code, I think it's called the pandex. And so Louisiana, for example, has a blend of Spanish and French law, but built upon the codes of both countries. But no, Napoleon came up with what's a magnificent code, and it was done in French, of course, and then Louisiana's first civil code was written both in French and in English, and they were both equally valid until the 1825 revisions or something like that. Yes, Sammy? Yes. That's a really good question. So how did Florida's laws change? So Florida, even parts of Texas, because Texas used to be a Mexican territory, Mexico is a civil law country too, parts of California as well, and Florida. So a lot of these states actually have influences of their law based upon their earlier civil law heritage. So for example, in Louisiana and in France, there's something called community property, and there's also something called forced airship. Does anyone know what that means? Forced airship? Forced airship? You know what an air is? H-E-I-R? Yes. Anna? It's like the air to the throne, right? Yeah, or the child of a parent, and when the parent dies, then the child inherits or is the heir to the property of their parent, right? So airship is just how you succeed to the property of your ancestors, right? Well in France, the idea was that you have an obligation to take care of your family, which means if you have children, you have to take care of them, and they shouldn't be a burden on society. So if you have children that have problems later on, they need money or they need to go to school, the parents have to pay for it, even if they're adults. It would be better than the parents have to do it than the society at large. So the civil code of France had a provision called forced airship, which meant you cannot, you have to leave something to your kids in your estate. You can't divest them of their property, so they have to get like half of your estate or one fourth of your estate, unless they do one of a few things. Like if your child hits you or refuses to bail you out of jail or marries someone without permission, one of those things, then you can disinherit your child, otherwise you can't. Now in most of the states of England and U.S., you can leave your money to whoever you want, okay? But in France, there was this forced airship. Louisiana inherited that, and also the community property idea, which is the idea that the man and the woman, when they're married, they each own part of everything they make together. That's community property. So Louisiana has that, France has that, European countries have that, and some American states have that too. California, Texas, I think Florida, partly because of this influence. So they retained parts of this French, European, civil law influence, although they changed their system to the common law anyway. Yes, heavily. Texas is heavily influenced by it. That's why we have community property here, and a lot of our terms, I think you'll even see the word immovable property sometimes, some of the laws here. So it's a blend. America's a blend, but most states are mostly common law except for Louisiana, which is mostly civil law. So they're kind of a blend, but that's a good question. Debbie, how are we doing on time? Okay, any other questions? Anybody want to talk about anything else? Gerard? Got any questions? So who thinks, what kind of law is more interesting? Physical law, moral law, economic law, or legal law? What's that? Physical. You think physical law is more interesting? Why? There's more of it. Interesting. Well, do you know what one interesting difference is between them? Do you know there are different ways of learning what these laws should be? So, for example, how would you find out about a physical law, like the law of gravity? How would you determine what the right law is? What do you do? What do scientists do? They observe. They formulate hypotheses, and they observe, and then if they find that what they predicted doesn't happen, then it's called falsification. That's the scientific method, right? So what they're trying to find is causal laws, causality, right? How things cause other things to happen in the natural world. Here's another example. Here's another difference between those laws. Can any of you violate the law of gravity? What if you tried? So it's impossible to violate a physical law. What about an economic law, like the law of supply and demand? Can you violate that law? Really? How can you violate it? How can you make more supply make the price go up? Can you do that really? Right. So these types of laws, remember I told, these are what we call descriptive laws. They describe reality. Now you could ignore them, but let's suppose you think you can fly and you can violate the law of gravity and you step off of the top of a skyscraper. What's going to happen? That reminds you of a joke that Ethan likes. What happens if you drop a piano down a coal mine? What do you get? A flat minor. A flat minor, very good. Yeah, I know, it's a bad joke. So you can ignore these laws of physics, but if you do, you're going to get hurt. Or you're not going to succeed. But you can't really violate those laws. But what about a moral law or a legal rule? Can you violate those? Like if a moral law says you shouldn't be rude to your grandmother, can you be rude to your grandmother? Yes. Should you be? No. No. And then a legal rule, like can you rob someone or take their property? Yes. But should you? No. And if you do, what might happen? You have a severe consequence. That's right. So that's why we call these laws prescriptive. Yes, Anna? Okay. Yes. And not only that, there was a movement in Montana and New York and some other states about a hundred years ago, what we call the codification movement. So what some of the common law people in those states wanted to do was they wanted to do what Napoleon had done in France and what Louisiana had done in Louisiana. They wanted to take the common law and turn it into a code and have the legislature enact it as a code. And there was a lot of resistance to that. And the movement pretty much lost. Oh, I think Montana did one code. In the meantime, there's something called the... Anyone heard of the UCC? Yes. You have? I've heard of it. It means uniform commercial code. So what that is is about 90 years ago, some legal experts in the U.S. started codifying all the common law that had been developed in the states. But they didn't do it through the legislature. They were just private scholars and they wrote down in a book, here's what we think the best way to present the law is. And then over time, some states adopted these as laws to make their law more streamlined and cleaner and to unclutter what had gone before. Yes, Nathan? Okay. That's a good question. So crimes. Actually, that's one thing I should have mentioned earlier. We're talking about different types of law in the law itself, like let's say the law enforced in Texas right now. There's different types of law. There's what we call private law, which is law of how we all get along with each other. Our property rights, contract rights, even family law. Who gets to have a kid if there's a divorce? These things. This is all private law or sometimes called civil law, which is confusing with the other word, but it just means the private law. Then there's what's called public law. That's how the government has to operate and how crimes are treated. The reason crimes aren't called a private law is because under the current way the government of the law works. The victim of a crime. So let's suppose you break into a store, not you, let's say some bad guy breaks into a store and he robs it. Who is the victim of that crime? No. Oh, wash it? No, no. I agree with you. That's who the victim is under private law and so the owner of the store could sue him under civil law, under private law, he could sue him for damages, trespass or whatever. But if he gets charged with a crime and goes to jail, the victim is the government or the state. That's their idea. That's their theory. That's why it's the public prosecutor that prosecutes someone and that's why it's up to the government and the judges and the court to decide whether they go to jail or not because the idea is this guy is acting outside of normal rules. He's a danger to society. He's breaching the peace, right? He's a walking threat to everyone else. So the government is going to say he's a danger to society and the government sets itself up as the agent for all society as the government's going to treat themselves as the victim and they're going to prosecute this guy and put him in jail. So you have two types of law, criminal law and private law. So under criminal law, there's different types of crimes. This is another good question. Something interests me. This is in the Latin phrase. One's called malum in se and one's called malum prohibitum. Now the word malum means bad. Anyone ever heard the word mal like in Spanish means bad, right? And there's a new movie coming out called Maleficent, right? Mal sort of means bad, right? Malum means a bad act. Malum prohibitum is a law that's bad only because the government makes a law about it and says you shouldn't do it. You could make up any law. If you have black hair, you can't drive in a car on Sundays. That would be malum prohibitum because most people wouldn't think there's anything naturally wrong with that. But the other types of laws, malum in se, means things that are bad in themselves. Like most people would say it's wrong to steal from people. It's wrong to hit people. It's wrong to hurt people. We all know this already. It's already wrong and when the government makes it a crime, they're just making something that's a natural crime into a state crime, okay? So among those crimes, there's different types. There's larceny, arson. Anyone know what arson is? Who knows what arson is? Leon. Setting something on fire. It's the type of destroying property. Yeah, do you have a question? It depends upon the legal system and in fact, there are different codes. Most states have different codes. So like in Louisiana, there's a civil code which is the private law system. But there's also a criminal code which defines what a crime is. Sometimes they specify what the punishment is. Usually it gives a range. So it says, for example, for a minor crime of a certain type, the punishment can be from between two and 10 years. And then it's up to the judge or the jury to decide how severe you should be punished based upon other factors. So it depends upon the legal system. Some are very specific. Some leave the discretion up to the judge or to the jury. Yeah. What if it's like a major crime? Major crimes tend to have more severe punishments. So like murder is going to tend to get a more severe punishment than just stealing a bubblegum from a store. Usually. It's not always like that. Yes, Andrea? Let's say someone that breaks into a store with their store owners like super protective of it. Yes. What would happen if the person who was robbing the store didn't cause that much damage? The store owner was so mad. He kind of like started hurting him. Like physically hurting, throwing stuff on him, hitting him to the ground. What would happen to the store owner? That's a good question. So let's suppose someone breaks into a store and they don't get stopped or the store owner's not there and then they leave and they get away with stealing a few things. After the fact, the store owner has a few choices. He could call the district attorney, which is the government prosecutor, and say please press charges against this guy. Put him in jail. And then if he didn't do that much damage, he might not go to jail for as long. But if the store owner wanted to sue him under the private court system for damages, say you damaged my property, well then the more damage the guy did, the more money he's going to owe. If he didn't do much damage, there's probably not going to be a big penalty. But the more he stole, the more he damaged or the longer he was in the store or if he broke the locks getting in, the worst damage he did and the higher the penalty would be. But that's after the fact. If he gets caught in the act, then the question is, what is the store owner or the property owner entitled to do to defend his property? So that's the question comes down to what we call in the law proportionality. Anyone know what proportionality means? You don't know what proportions are? What? Yeah, how much of something. So what that means is the worse the crime, the more severe your response can be. Both during the act and after. So if it's just some little kid stealing a candy bar, if the owner pulled out a gun and shot him, he would probably be charged with murder because that's disproportionate. It's too much of a punishment for that little crime. But if it's a big guy and it's late at night and he's making noises and the owner doesn't know if he's about to get really hurt, in most states, at least in the U.S., you can use up to lethal force, which means defend yourself by killing the bad guy if you have to, but it becomes a judgment call at a certain point. Okay? Usually in America, we have what we inherited from England, which is the jury system, okay? So if there's a crime, you have a right to be tried by a jury. You can't just be a government judge and the jury's always fellow citizens. And the idea there is you have to have 12 people good and true, and if just one of them disagrees, you can't be convicted. And the idea is there to keep the government from abusing its power. Now that's not the case in civil law countries and other countries. So in the jury system, if some store owner or homeowner hurts someone breaking into their home and it was a fairly reasonable way of defending themselves and the prosecutor tried to put them in jail for going too far, it's very hard to find a jury of 12 people, like in Texas, to all agree we should convict this guy. Usually they're going to side with the innocent store owner, unless he just went crazy overboard and did something that was obviously unfair. Nathan? Yes. Okay, that's, yeah, I didn't answer that question earlier, so let me get back to that. So that's a type of, the general concept is called homicide. Again, it's another Latin type phrase. Anyone know what does homicide mean? Break it down into two parts. What's homamine and what's side mean? Michael? You know what side means? Anyone know what regicide means? Or suicide? Paraside? Side means to kill, right? And homa means man, like homo sapiens. So homicide means killing a man. So there's, the general category is homicide. If you commit an action that causes the death of another person, in general that's homicide. Now there are some types of homicide which are not a crime or which are not punishable because it's, if you do it in defense of your store, that would be homicide but it would be, you would have an excuse or a defense. But if you don't have an excuse, there's different levels of homicide. So there's vehicular homicide. If you have an accident and you're not being careful in your car, that'd be vehicular homicide, right? You know, you don't really do it on purpose but it was your fault. So you could be in trouble for that. The next level would be manslaughter which is you just lose your temper and you hit someone and then it kills them, okay? You didn't really plan to kill them. So that'd be manslaughter. Then you have, it depends on the state and if second and first degree murder. The first degree is the worst where you plan it ahead of time. Like you plan it for months ahead of time and you just go out and do it intentionally. That gets the worst punishment. Usually sometimes the death penalty in different states. So that's the different levels of homicide and that's arranged usually by statute under the criminal code. But that happens with other types of crimes too. Like for example, burglary is different than theft. That just means taking someone, something from someone that you don't own. So even if like someone's sleeping and they're taking a nap and you just take their purse, that's theft. Burglary means you actually take it from them when they're aware of it. So that's an extra danger. And robbery is different too. Robbery means breaking into a house, okay? And taking stuff from the house. So there are different types of theft as well. And armed robbery is breaking into a house or dwelling with a weapon or at night because that's more dangerous you see. So there's different levels of classification of theft as well. James. So we went to Williamsburg recently and for our newspaper, at Williamsburg we went to a courthouse in a jail. And so for our newspaper this week, Spoiler Alert, we are going to compare and contrast the legal systems from back when the settlers came to the new land in America. And today we convict people involved in that. So Ms. Nickerson in the whole class was wondering if you could, after we finish our article for our newspaper, correct and see if we have everything. Yeah, I'll be happy to take a look at it. Thank you. And I would say there's two main differences. One is the early legal system in the country was heavily based upon the English common law just like we still are, but now there's more statutes. And also the crimes back then were more draconian. If I know what draconian means, if I heard of the Emperor Draco, he had really severe punishments in somewhere in Greece or somewhere. In other words, the punishments were much more severe. Capital punishment was much more often. They would put people in lost arcades. Hanging was more common. Things were more rough back then, more brutal in some ways. So that's one difference. But the basic legal system was not really that different. Ethan, yes? Well, then you have a family feud like the Hat Fuels and McCoys that goes on for generations and they just keep fighting each other forever and ever. You could have that. But it just depends upon the situation. So there's a doctrine in the law which is a common sense idea that if you see someone having a fight, let's say, two people that you don't know. Okay, let's say one man is attacking another man and it looks like one guy is really hurting the other guy and the other guy is not doing anything. So you assume this one guy is a victim. You have the right under the law to try to rescue, which means you have the right to use force against the guy that looks like he's the aggressor and stop him. Now, if it turns out later you made a mistake and really the guy that was the one you attacked was the victim, it depends upon whether you were reasonable or not. Like, if they made it look like one guy was the bad guy but he wasn't, then you might be okay. That's why you have to be careful when you intervene and you also have to be careful if you get in a fight because if you get in a fight, other people don't know who's the right guy or the wrong guy all the time. That's why it's usually better to go to the law. That's why the law discourages what we call self-help, which is going out settling your things on your own. Another reason is because if you think you've been wronged, you're going to tend to favor yourself. You're not partial, like Lady Justice, right? You're going to tend to take your own side. It's better to go to a neutral third party journal. Yes. That would be called either negligent homicide or manslaughter. So it's a crime or it could be a crime but it's a much lower crime than doing it on purpose. So you could be in trouble but not nearly as much trouble as if you do it on purpose. And that makes sense, right? We want to tell people not to do things on purpose that are bad and we can only control what we do on purpose, right? So negligence is sort of like half on purpose. People just means you're not being careful enough but it's not the same thing as setting out to do something horrible. Yes, Liam. That's another good question. Fraud is one of these words that people use very loosely without defining it, especially non-lawyers and even some lawyers. Sometimes we use the word fraud to refer to just being dishonest, like you defrauded me, you were fraudulent, you just weren't being an honest person. But in the legal sense, what fraud really means is what we call theft by trick. So what that means is let's suppose you want to sell me your pen for a dollar, okay? And I give you a fake dollar, right? Or you want to trade me your pen for an apple and I give you an apple that I know is really rotten. So you're not getting what you wanted for that pen and I take the pen and I run away with it. I've really, I've stolen the pen from you by trick. So that's really what fraud is. So that is treated as a potential crime and as a civil, as a private law thing. Yes. Yes. So what you're talking about is if there's some kind of shady transaction on the stock market that hurts another company, you could be sued for money and you could also be sued by the government or prosecuted and put in jail. And there's two reasons for that. Number one, there could be cases of fraud like I just described, but because the law defines things that are crimes, there's one called insider trading, okay? Now, some people don't think that should be a crime or that's not always fraudulent, but it still is on the books. So insider trading means if you're an insider at a company like the chief executive and you know certain things they're about to do and you go and you sell or buy stock in your company based upon secret knowledge to try to make money because let's say you think you're going to have a bad report tomorrow and you know your stock's going to fall. So if you sell the stock short, then what you're doing is defrauding the people that you sold short to because they didn't have the benefit of your knowledge and that violates the insider trading laws. So that could be a federal crime as well as a civil, a civil tort. Andreas, yes. Yes. But he just asked for an apple. Yes. He never said I want a good apple or a bad apple. Right. You just gave him an apple. Yep. You said that he called that. That's a really, that's a really good question. The reason is because now this, again, something that took me until I was 40 years old to figure out, okay? But what are you and I doing right now when we're discussing with each other? What are we using? In language, right? So we can communicate. It's hard to imagine animal creatures trading with each other that can't communicate with each other. It really requires intelligence and language and the ability to communicate, right? Communication is the use of language and words which are always in a social context, okay? So there's always, if I ask you for an apple, you know what I mean. I want an apple to eat it. That means I don't want a rotten apple. So we have certain assumptions or implications or what the law calls default provisions, okay? So the law would say when I, when you say apple or when I say apple, it's what a, you would understand what a reasonable person would understand that to me, okay? Now, as a matter of fact, let's suppose that I gave you a rotten apple and you're not happy with me and you sue me and you lose because the judge says, well, he gave you an apple. All you asked for was an apple. What are people going to start doing in the future? They're going to start saying, okay, I want an apple and I want to make sure it doesn't have worms in it and you know, so you start making more specific, more specifics in your request. So people respond to what the judge is doing earlier cases and they modify their behavior and if it looks like they have to be more careful in what they say because the judges are going to be kind of literal about everything, then they'll start being more careful. But what they really do is the judge is just say, look, everyone knows this is what you really meant. So here's a reasonable interpretation. So that's what the law tries to do. It tries to interpret language according to the way reasonable people use it. Yes, Anna? The bad guy gets shot? Okay. Probably not if it looked like it was a reasonable self-defense. If he didn't use disproportionate force, if he didn't use too much force. So then the question is, so the prosecutor would press charges if they thought they could win. But they only think they can win if they think they can get 12 jurors to convict the guy. So they're going to think to themselves, what are most Texas citizens going to think about the way this guy acted? Are they going to think he was acting reasonably or did he go too far? Now you do have some cases where you have some teenager who's robbing a store. He just takes a cupcake and then the guy catches him and the guy, he runs out, he's leaving, and then you shoot him in the back on the way out. He'd say you didn't have to shoot the guy, you weren't defending yourself. That was basically murder. So you could be charged in those cases. And most people wouldn't do that. They wouldn't go too far. Yes. That's a type of fraud too. Yeah, because what you're doing is you're lying to the bank, let's say, or to the merchant you're buying from. You're pretending like you're someone else and you're taking money from someone else's bank account that you don't have the right to take and spending it on something. So it's a way of stealing someone's money. So that would be a type of fraud or even theft, or sometimes we call that conversion in the common law. Conversion is another word for theft. Well, the way copyright usually works is it covers information. So usually not what you're asking, but there is one case where the copyright law says that, well, there's a version of the copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1988, okay? And what that does is it outlaws, it's hard to, okay, bear with me, it outlaws circumvention technology, which means if I have a copyright on a movie and I sell the movie and I put a code on this DVD or this Blu-ray disc that makes it hard for people to copy it, that's called DRM, Digital Rights Management, okay? The purpose of that technology is to prevent people from copying it, but sometimes they have a right to copy it. Under fair use laws, you have the right to make a personal copy. It's hard to do it because of the DRM. Well, you can buy a device that will crack that code, that's called circumvention technology. And under the DMCA, that's a federal crime to have that piece of equipment. So it's sometimes a crime to own a piece of equipment that could break the code, even if breaking the code was not a violation of copyright law because you had a fair use defense. So there are these weird things in the law that makes certain things illegal that you wouldn't think are illegal. In fact, I read a study, copyright is really easy to violate, even on accident, okay? This one professor, a law professor named John Teheranian, he did a study and he said, how many accidental copyright infringements does every American commit every year and how much is the penalties that they owe if they had to add all this up? You know what he concluded? Every one of us, not you guys, makes about 4.5 billion dollars worth of copyright infringements every year on accident. 4.5 billion each. So there are certain things in the law that are kind of not really enforceable right now, but they're dangerous. So you do have to be careful with some of that stuff. So piracy is not really a good idea. It's really dangerous. Usually you're in trouble when you upload the information instead of downloading it. It's bad to download it, it's the worst to upload it. If you take a pirated copy of a movie, there's a guy that uploaded one copy of the Wolverine movie about five years ago to the internet and he got put in federal jail for one year. But if you download, usually it's not as big of a penalty because you're just doing it to one person to yourself. You could be penalized, yes. If you didn't know it's still a crime or you could still be fined. In fact there's a new system out about the last year or two called a six strikes in your out system. Anybody guys heard about that? That's a system that the copyright industry and Hollywood and the music industry agreed with all these cable companies like Comcast where if they detect that you're using your home computer to download copyrighted files you shouldn't be downloading or to upload them which is even worse. They'll give you a warning that the warnings then you'll finally lose your right to ever use the internet for your whole life. So it's dangerous. So you've got to be real careful about that stuff. Sammy, that's kind of what Anna's question was and that would be a case of fraud or theft. You could get in big trouble for that. You're basically stealing someone's money by doing that. You're stealing the credit cards about money is really what you're doing because the credit card company's going to make the original holder, they're going to give them a... All right, Ethan, go ahead. Framing? What do you mean? I'm actually... I think it's some kind of state crime but I'm not sure how it's classified. I'm pretty sure it's a crime. I think it would probably be something like obstruction of justice or something like that but I'm pretty sure it's a crime. It's like fraud but I don't think they call it fraud. It's some other kind of... Okay, Liam? Yes. Yeah, you're exactly right. If someone's buying a football team or the Astrodome or building a million-dollar school expansion you're going to pay lawyers to write a big long contract with everything specified. If you're just buying a candy bar for a dollar even if the candy bar is a bad candy bar it might not be worth it to write a big contract out just to save yourself a dollar. So there's different levels of legal protection that you can have. Yeah, Nathan? Well, I think those kind of people tend to be viewed as troublemakers and they're just trying to cause problems for people. Now under the law there's something called abandonment, right? So if you own a piece of property let's say I make a chair I find some wood in the forest and no one owns it. I take this wood and now I own it because no one else had it and now I make a chair out of it. I own the chair, right? So I come to own the chair but if I want to get rid of the chair I can give it away, right? I can give it to you as a gift or I can sell it to you or I can abandon it. So abandonment means you decided not to own something anymore that you own and the way we figured that out is you either make an official declaration and you tell the world I hereby abandon this or you do something that indicates that by your behavior. And if you leave your backpack on the street and walk away someone might assume the guy is abandoning it. It's kind of a fuzzy case. It's in between. Some people might assume you lost it and you still own it and if someone picks it up they're just picking it up to try to find the owner to return it to them, okay? I would say that in the general case you described if I'm walking down the street and I see a backpack on the ground and I pick it up I'm going to assume that someone lost it and they still own it but I'm going to assume that they don't mind giving me permission to pick it up if the purpose is to try to return it to them but if my goal is to pick it up and run away with it they wouldn't consent to that. So you have to decide how do people want you to use their property, okay? And the reasonable assumption is that if you find something that looks like it's still owned you need to treat it like someone else owns it but it's probably okay to take it to try to find the owner as long as you don't, you know but if you try for a year and you can't find them I think the law would say that you're a finder finders keepers. You finally get to keep it. Like if it's just a gold bar with no, you can't tell who owns it and you try, you can keep it after a while. Same thing with like lost treasure in the ocean something like that. It's a similar principle. Yeah. I didn't mention that but that I think in today's climate if you leave a backpack somewhere and you sort of run away from it you basically, you might be in trouble for trying to scare people, right? That's because they might think you have a bomb or something in it, right? Something bad. So you got to be careful. You don't want to give people the wrong impression, right? You might have to call the police. They might have to cordon the city off and get the bomb unit out and figure all this out. So you got to be careful of things on purpose to try to mess with people's heads. Under the law, under the legal system there's something called, ever heard of gods have heard of assault and battery? Most people think assault and battery means when you hit someone. Well that's what battery is. Assault is the first part. Assault means trying to commit a battery or making someone afraid of receiving a battery. It's like a threat. So I think what leaving the backpack there like that could be called assault which is a crime as well because it's like an attempted. It's an attempted battery or it's putting people in fear of receiving a battery. Anyway, yes. I think it's more statues now. I think the punishments were more draconian. And the other difference would be if it was before after 1789 or 1776 then if it was after the U.S. Revolution it would be also under the U.S. Constitution which has a separate set of principles which shaped the law. If it was before 1776 it would be almost pure British common law. After 1789 when the U.S. Constitution was ratified it would all be under the rubric of the state constitution and the federal constitution. So that could make some differences too. I enjoyed it. I agree and I told my friends I was speaking to 4th 5th and 6th graders and they said you can't talk to 4th 5th graders about this kind of stuff. I said believe me, these kids are interested and they're intelligent and they have good questions and they deserve to learn sophisticated things too. You guys are great. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you guys. Yes.