Overview

• Many additional rules and regulations are required for peaceful coexistence within a community. There is a range of reasonable and fair ways to interpret and implement the Legal Principle across various topics and factual situations. This is an expected and manageable challenge for any free community.

Importing existing legal processes

• Rather than ‘reinvent the wheel’ on many of these legal issues, we can import the existing legal frameworks that have been developed over hundreds of years of common law by thoughtful judges and juries. Much of the heavy lifting has already been done for us. Many of these rules relate to tort law, property law, and contract law, all of which are generally well aligned with the Legal Principle in most jurisdictions where the rule of law is respected, such as the USA, the UK, and many other civilized countries.
• There is no reason to be daunted by the need to create these local rules. Once communities are free to implement and experiment with their own reasonable interpretations of the Legal Principle, it will become clear which interpretations maximize the quality of life for inhabitants. Others will then seek to adopt the best of other communities’ rules.
• Case precedents will also help define how each law applies in specific factual situations.
• When attempting to implement laws, rules, and regulations that deviate from a reasonable interpretation or violate some aspect of due process, including if they are too vague, legal mechanisms need to be available for people to challenge these laws, rules, and regulations formally.
• Local communities must give clear notice of what laws, rules, and regulations apply in the local area. Due process requires that people have an opportunity to be informed of the substance of local laws.
  • For example, the age of consent in any given area must be clearly publicized. If the age of consent is 18, and a 20-year-old from a community that recognizes a 17-year-old age of consent engages in what he believes to be consensual sex with a 17-year-old in that local community, the 20-year-old would nonetheless have committed the crime of statutory rape. People are entitled to know in advance what law applies in the community.

Areas requiring local community rules and considerations

As well as defining local interpretations for the inevitable grey areas, local communities will need to implement additional laws, rules, and regulations in many areas, such as:

• Driving Rules
  • Reasonable people may disagree about traffic conventions, such as which side of the road to drive on. The local community must adopt a consistent and reasonable standard.
• Licensing for Dangerous Activities
  • Local communities may reasonably require a person to demonstrate competence before engaging in activities that could cause substantial harm to others, such as driving on public roads, storing hazardous chemicals, or using extraordinarily dangerous weapons.
• Environmental Regulations
  • Smoke, loud noises, and pollution are each trespasses and therefore aggression. However, some trespasses are so minor that they can be considered non-actionable. An example would be the faint scent of a hamburger on a neighbor’s backyard barbecue. Communities must determine which trespasses are so minor that they should be legally ignored. As such, local communities can reasonably set de minimis thresholds to decide which trespasses are so minor that they should not be considered aggression and which are substantial enough to warrant legal action.
• Public Drug Use
  • While the Legal Principle protects a competent adult’s right to ingest any substance, it does not protect a right to endanger or disturb others while doing so. A community can reasonably restrict drug use in public places.
• Assisted Suicide
  • Reasonable people may disagree about the required level of competence before a person may end their own life with assistance. The local community must determine boundaries within a reasonable, ethical, and legal framework.
• Appropriate Punishment
  • Punishment for breaches of the Legal Principle must not exceed what is proportionate to the crime. However, exactly how and to what extent criminals are punished is open to different interpretations and must be decided by local communities.
  • 3L has no universal theory of punishment.
    • Excessive force is outlawed (it must be limited to what is proportionate).
      • Death penalty: only a first-degree murderer who has at least one aggravating factor, such as torture, an extensive violent criminal record, or multiple murders, that outweighs any mitigating factors, could be justifiable.
    • There is no minimum punishment required; a victim may choose to forgive the aggressor. A local community must decide how much weight to give to a victim’s choice to forego any punishment.
• Statutory limitations
  • The age at which a legal claim remains valid is something local communities might choose to determine. Statutes of limitations are often employed because of the inherent unreliability or unavailability of evidence to support or refute a claim.
• General civil law principles
  • The following principles and definitions may broadly be utilized from established common law systems: fairness, reasonableness, estoppel, rules about statutory interpretation, separation of powers, and equality under the law.