This Needs Fixin'

The U.S. has always been kind of a patchwork of legal systems, and of course the countries of the world are an even more diverse collection.

And that’s fine; good, even.

Since we have a wide variety of people, and getting a bunch of people to agree on anything at all is virtually impossible, it’s inevitable that various groups would organize themselves in a variety of ways.

In theory this means that people can live with governments and legal systems that they agree with, though this is true only in a perfect world. In our world, it is much less so.

See Freedom & Consent: There Are No Legitimate States for more on that.

So we need ways for those various legal systems to interact to do things across these boundaries.

But since a basic point of this variety is that these various systems disagree about what is legal or illegal, these interactions can be very problematic.

Between countries, these interactions are set out in treaties; between U.S. states things get a little more … unpredictable.

But in both cases, there are a few principles that we should be following; as a State, you should only help with a foreign investigation or extradition request when:

• the foreign jurisdiction has a history of integrity in legal matters
• the facts alleged would be criminal in their jurisdiction
• the facts alleged would also be criminal in your jurisdiction

(Given that our legal system has another category for civil cases, this would exclude some things; it’d be more complicated to come up with reasonable rules for requests on civil matters, though, since they’re messier and more up to specific courts, but the same underlying principles should apply.)

Internally, the U.S. is starting to approach this position.

Since the Supreme Court overturned the precedent protecting access to abortion as a federal right, the states have started to getting really different on abortion laws. And some states have started forbidding their law enforcement from assisting abortion-related investigations from states where abortion is illegal.

And some countries have started restricting extradition to countries that practice execution, for alleged crimes that would be eligible for that sentence.

This is good, but doing it in this issue-specific way is wrong.

We need to establish these as general principles.

Or, maybe, as just one principle:

A State should not be assisting another to prosecute people for actions that it does not itself forbid.

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