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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

It is awfully sad that we need laws that describe what we're allowed to do rather than what's forbidden.

That's the wrong way to look at it, this is a law limiting what the government can do. For really broad, difficult to define crimes like "neglect" or "child abuse", it makes sense to pass additional legislation limiting how those laws can be applied.

The parent is correct. It is sad that this is necessary. Similarly, the bill of rights was almost not included at all, because the original premise was that you had ALL rights that were not specifically prohibited in the constitution. That the bill of rights has turned out to be necessary at all, is also sad.

I am thankful for this law, and for the bill of rights, but it is sad that we require either. We were not supposed to.

I don't understand the issue. Do you agree that child abuse should be a crime? If so, do you think you could correctly define it in legally precise language on the first try, with no unintended consequences? Legislators are human and make mistakes. It's good that they're proactively considering potential unintended effects of a law, and it's not that sad that they didn't get it exactly right the first time.

I don't think child abuse necessarily needs to be a separate law from general harm.

You'd have the same issue even if there weren't a specific child abuse law. Does letting your 8-year-old walk to school alone count as "general harm"? What about leaving them home alone for a day? A week? A month? Who gets to decide? If the law doesn't specify, the police and the courts decide. And if the police start making decisions that the public disagrees with, then we pass new legislation to clarify what exactly counts as general harm.

How is that different from a 35 year old mentally handicapped sibling under your care? It's not a question of age, it's one of responsibility.

It's not different. If police started arresting people for letting their adult mentally handicapped dependents do reasonably independent things, then it might be a good idea to pass some legislation to modify the relevant law.

It has to be separate because your responsibilities towards your kids are different than your responsibilities towards other people. There are things you can do to your kids you can't do to other people (e.g. grounding). There are things you can't do to your kids that you can do to other people (e.g. refuse to provide shelter).

That's not limited to children, your parents with dementia may have diminished capacity. Age is a trap as not all 16 year old children are capable of taking care of themselves for a weekend alone, but many are.

You're missing it. If the original law is overbroad, it makes sense to modify the original law, not pass a second law adding exemptions where it doesn't apply. If something as innocuos as letting your kids walk home was "endangerment", there are still other, equally innocuous things that qualify as endangerment but aren't covered by this exception. In other words, if the standard is wrong, change the standard (but keep it uniform), don't add (non-uniform) exceptions for the examples that showed the standard was wrong

I think it's very hard, if not impossible, to write the kind of uniform standard you're talking about. I feel pretty confident that if you came up with an example standard, we could both easily come up with unintended effects and unclear gray areas.

Perhaps this is a clarifying question: are the activities associated with 'free range children' covered under child abuse laws?

Yes, otherwise this new law would be unnecessary. Utah has a child abuse law, and saw that other states were overreaching with similar laws. So they're passing new legislation to amend and limit their own existing child abuse law.

I don't know the history of Constitutional philosophy among the unwashed masses, but my anecdata suggests that the backwards understanding of the Constitution exists at least in part because of the Bill of Rights.

> because the original premise was that you had ALL rights

Where does the ninth amendment fit into that?

"... all rights *that are not outlawed". Many institutions have the capacity to regulate law. So if a lower ranking level would out-law, the top level might need to correct.

> The bill specifies that it isn't neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car.

My point is if they start a list of not-neglectful things, then it becomes the list of authorized-only things. What about letting my kids chop wood, light a barbecue, carve a chicken, swim in a lake without supervision?

Ok, can you write a law that allows those things while disallowing "leave my 8 year old at home for a month while I go on vacation"? Where are you going to draw the line, and how? Do you think you can get a whole state to agree with you on where the line should be? Does age matter? If so, what ages matter, and how? Do you think public attitudes might change in the future, and require the line to move?

The only way to write this law would be to provide basically no guidance and give police and judges and enormous amount of discretion, or to provide a lot of detail that includes concrete examples of things that are allowed and things that aren't. The world is too complex to write this in purely general terms and expect it to work without issue.

Of course you can't write such a law. My point is that because such a law is impossible to write, I think it is better to defer to common sense, and to attack CPS when they're overreaching.

Laws do describe what is forbidden. Utah legislators noticed that in some states with language similar to Utah's laws on what is prohibited, the laws were applied or interpreted in ways that don't match what they wanted for Utah, and passed a law correcting Utah's existing prohibitions to clearly and explicitly prevent similar application in Utah.

The original constitution carefully outlined people's rights so as to limit the power of government. Law's affirming people's rights can be very powerful

If you're talking about the bill of rights, the fact that they're all "amendments" should be a hint that they're not part of the "original constitution".

Yeah, the blacklist approach to legislation is much preferable to the whitelist approach, at least in terms of human rights and societal evolution.

The exact opposite approach of good (e.g. network) security. Coincidence? I think not.

Does your work computer only allow access to whitelisted websites? I hope not, because that would make it really hard to get anything done.

Security always involves trade-offs. Unthinkingly choosing the most restrictive policy every time is not a good security practice.

I'm speaking more from the database/XSS side of things, where a blacklist is about as useful as no list at all.

There are absolutely times where security has to be compromised, even abandoned, in the name of usability, and times where security must be ironclad, even user-hostile. Civil rights law is definitely the former.

Perhaps. But, but it could be arising more from a need to codify the unwritten rules of society.

Why do they now need to be codified when they've worked (more or less) as implicit rules for so long? Seems like different reasons for everything. In this case, the protective tendencies and govt agencies started to over-run the 'free-range' tendencies, and this just pushes it back a bit.

I don't really see it that way. From a legal perspective, it's just preventing legitimate parenting techniques from being dragged into an over-broad definition of neglect.

I understand the intent. And this makes sense. I'm just saying that we're seeing a case of "negligence is everything except what is specifically mentioned as being authorized".

Well, we're seeing a case where a type of parenting is viewed as neglectful, so we're adding a law to enshrine it's legality in the face of changing cultural norms among certain sets of the population.

This is not the same as "Anything not enshrined in law is unauthorized."

This seems like a matter of the legislature reining in law-enforcement whose interpretations have become overly broad, something legislatures (and Congress) also sometimes does to the judicial system.

I agree that it can be cast in an awkward light but it's not uncommon.

Yeah I think OP is highlighting the presence of the over-broad definition of neglect in the first place.

You mean like the bill of rights?

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