Orange County, CA November 3, 1998 General
Smart Voter

On Unser, Responsibility and Law

By Frank Perdicaro

Candidate for Member, City Council; City of Fountain Valley

This information is provided by the candidate
A letter to OCR responding to criticism of Bobby Unser's actions.
Mon Oct 12 10:11:37 PDT 1998

On Unser, Responsibility and Law

Mr. Moser begins his castigation of Bobby Unser with the

statement that ignorance of the law is not valid excuse. Is this
ancient wisdom really that wise? Our country was formed around
this idea, but the notion is invalid today.

The idea that every man should behave in accordance to law,

even if the exact text of the law is not know, is an outgrowth of
the idea of a Constitution. The US Constitution lays down a
framework and and all laws flow from it. All laws are related
to the simple ideas clearly stated in the Constitution, so every
man has a duty to understand and obey these ideas. This is itself
was a reaction to the law of kings, where edits could be issued
for any reason at any time. It was impossible to know what
was in the king's mind; it was not possible to behave according
to any know set of rules; one's life and liberty were always
in danger.

Try and draw a connection to today. Take some time and venture

down to the Orange County Law Library in downtown Santa Ana. Read
the laws so ignorance REALLY cannot be an excuse. Start with the
regulations and ordinances for you city. This is probably a thick
book, but one that could be finished in a day. Then start on the
laws of the State of California. The text of the laws occupies
about fifty linear feet of shelf space. Given enough coffee, you
might get through the laws in a month.

But the text of the laws is only part of it. The true nature

of law is shown in case law. Case law is the set of legal decisions
made on the basis of the text of the law, and is the day-to-day law
use in the courtroom. The case law for the State of California
occupies about one thousand linear feet of shelf space. This will
take you a year to read.

We all know the US Government has grown large in the past

few decades. The size and complexity of the government can only be
comprehended by reading the laws, and regulations that have the
effect of law, that rule our lives every day. Unfortunately, it
would take about a century to read the laws and regulations now in
effect, so any person actually attempting to understand the law
would be dead before he finished.

Ignorance of the law is an excuse, because it is fundamentally

impossible to know the law. This was not always the case, but it
certainly is the case today.

We have reached the point foreseen by James Madison when he

wrote

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by
men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if
they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo
such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today,
can guess what it will be tomorrow.

Bobby Unser is acting in the best of American traditions,

taking personal risk to protest an unjust, irrational and vile
situation.

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 15, 1998 06:08
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