Decades ago when I was the education coordinator for Multnomah County Animal Control (Portland, OR) I attended a conference about animal law sponsored by Lewis and Clark Law School. https://law.lclark.edu This slightly eclectic private law school has an excellent reputation and is located near Lewis and Clark College, www.lclark.edu which is similar, but not the same. Both claim to be “global.” This was how they approached things like the traffic in exotic animals as well as urban dilemmas about animal bad behavior.
One of the most impressive speakers introduced us to the idea that the big “macro” laws like constitutions and treaties, often have less to do with justice than the “little” laws framed as administration or regulations, often changed or initiated or abridged without any notice or even particular rationale except for economics. Many of these apply to capturing, buying, selling, welfare, disease control and so on — all about the pet trade, or the unsophisticated countries where a rhinoceros horn is a prestigious dagger, or a bear gall bladder is supposed to cure something or other. Many of these seemingly inconsequential rules guard against dangerous things we encountered, like the fellow who kept a tiger in his yard or the elephant that went rogue in Hawaii.
But we are discovering now how crucial these “rules” are to the Covid pandemic and the right to vote. By fiddling with requirements and time-limits, the results of national elections can be controlled. This is the level of law that Trumpists want to destroy — the regulators, the administrators, the inspectors whom they see as obstacles to profit. Profit is everything, beyond honor and unforeseen consequences. Something as simple as a plain cloth mask is demonized all over again.
At one point the wholesaler in North Central Montana who supplied bread to the local momandpop store decided it wasn’t worth his while to drive to such a small place. No rule stopped him. But when someone local thought this might be a good opportunity to start a town bakery, a storm of health regulations and stipulations about commercial bakeries hit that person. I’ve been waiting for someone to invoke them against Folklore Coffee, which is Starbucks-level quality but a small local startup business.
At one point in my clerical specialist role for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings, my daily task was to update the city regulations that we kept on a long windowsill because there were a dozen books and they constantly expanded. Every day I took some pages out and put a handful of new pages in. I expect that by now the books are online and posting them is a second chore, because the physical books need to remain. Even the cloud can be hacked.
If you’ve been following, you know that I’ve had no furnace for weeks, getting by on portable heaters and an electrical mattress pad that the cats love. Regulations and standards are crucial to gas installations because of the potential explosions like the one that demolished a gallery on the main street in Bozeman, killing the manager. One or another restriction has constantly tripped a new delay on my furnace, day after day, from ancient and leaking gas meter, to not working on weekends, to a deadly storm that took the temp to seven degrees below zero, to not having a small part on hand, to using a nonconforming pipe (flexible steel-reinforced) that would not be approved outdoors in order to deliver heat — it’s been grueling.
Montana is a state that attracts law breakers because, true to form, our legislators — like Daines and Gianforte — feel free to ignore laws and strangle media people who oppose them. Gas installers here don’t necessarily need anything in the way of qualification or training, unless they might belong to a franchise that asks for that in case of lawsuits. Our MD’s can escape monitoring of lawsuits, and competing versions of low-level health care abound. Partly it’s residual defiance from frontier days — which is how the dubiously motivated love to frame it — and partly it’s that the population is increasing and the technology is out on the edge, no longer about a guy with a strong back and an idea about resources. And SURPRISE! The “Indians” are still here and smarter and more powerful than ever.
Funny regulations persist about buggy whips or something else obsolete. Trump thinks women still stay home and wash the dishes by hand. Legislators, esp. the Repub Senate, are so old they can hardly see to read, but they run young cynical staffs who search endlessly for loopholes and evasion. The Rule of Law is a concept that is mocked.
When rationally worked-out standards and limits are developed, that’s one thing. Add the lawyer’s jots and tittles, and that complexifies it more. Add to that the politically lobbying people who want something, and the system becomes nearly paralyzed. Thus, sunset laws.
My life was changed by Mike Burgwin’s organization of a citizen panel to rethink the County animal control laws. I was the reference librarian. Mike deliberately asked for all points on the spectrum of people with opinions, from those who hated and feared dogs to those who believed dogs were people. (He left off Graziella Boucher, an ancient woman who was a little loopy and claimed her husky was a wolf.) Francis Smith, an honorable lawyer who raised beagles, took on the chair and guided us ably. In time, after much passion and puzzlement over things like how long a leash should be, the group wrote an excellent document, used as a pattern in many places. It was for me a marker for hope.
We are not raising the kind of people who can do this. Instead, we have teens who think their high school handbook is a video game to be outwitted and that the point of sports is only to win, regardless.
So some joker on the Mexican border imported protected parrots by duct-taping them inside the hubcaps of his car. When border inspectors found them, the joker’s defense was that there was no rule against taping birds inside your hubcaps. They were very dizzy and not all survived. Does there have to be a rule? Evidently.
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