Ignorance of the law is no excuse.<p>This is obviously a problem for people who wish to be law-abiding citizens if the laws themselves are secret.<p>Having too many laws for a single individual to keep track of can be nearly as good as having secret laws, when it comes to keeping people ignorant of the law, and thus making it easy for the government to persecute anyone they don't like by prosecuting them.<p>I read once about a defense attorney who played a game while riding along with a police officer. They would follow a car, and the policeman would win if he could point out a legitimate reason for which he could make a traffic stop, if he was so inclined.<p>The officer won every time, usually within a few blocks.<p>I saw a video [1] which noted that possession of a lobster can be illegal: "It doesn't matter if he's dead or alive. It doesn't matter if you killed it or it died of natural causes. It doesn't even matter if you acted in self defense! Did you know that? Did you know it could be a federal offense to be in possession of a lobster? Raise your hand if you did not know that. [audience raises hands] There's the problem!"<p>I don't think this situation is due to a conspiracy to take away our freedoms, on the principle that we needn't ascribe malicious intent when mere laziness and incompetence will suffice. Basically the law is a codebase with lots of sometimes-circular dependencies, which isn't refactored nearly aggressively enough, so the cruft accumulates. Taking into account that in the US the "initial commit" is hundreds of years old [3], there are ~50 forks, and it's still a fast-moving target, it's not surprising that the sheer amount of complexity is more than any one person can appreciate; even after decades of study and practice, AFAIK even the best professional lawyers are basically ignorant of the law in other specializations, and even within their own specialization they sometimes need teams of lawyers and paralegals poring over legal texts to find out exactly what the law says about their particular case.<p>[1] The quote occurs at about 6:55 [2] in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc</a><p>[2] The entire video is witty and informative, and it's something that everyone should watch at least once.<p>[3] Maybe it's more like <i>thousands</i> of years old -- if you go back through English law, there are probably things that go back to the Norman conquest in 1066, or Roman Britain even earlier.