Is Ignorance Tenable Under The Law To Avoid Being Punished For Wrongdoings?

Being ignorant about any specific law is not sufficient enough as defense in the court of law. Therefore, the fact of being ignorant can't give you any protection against the punishment for breaking the law. 

This is for no other reason than it is presumed that everybody within certain geographical entity knows about all the applicable laws of the land. And if truth be told this presumption is not ideal and it’s not right. The question is, how can this assumption be made without giving consideration to others who don’t even know the definition of law in the first instance?

Due to the peculiarity of each society, there are different types of laws made to guide all human interactions to ensure mutual and eventful cohabitation among every citizen. There are so many factors that contribute to the enactment of law and this is equally determined by the culture, history, prevailing events, sex, religion (in most cases) and all of these are closely related to the needs, yearning, aspiration, and priority set for such society to progress and attain security of lives and properties, self-sufficiency among others. Any law made is meant to guide all daily activities of everybody within such society or state. A law that is dependent and derivative is also contingent.

However as contingency all the laws made are, every individual is not expected to be intimate and aware of all the laws made in every society. The only provision for this to happen is if a special consideration is given to how every individual in such locality is updated through a systematic learning process about the laws. And, everybody is enforced to follow with a very stringent punishment for disobeying such order.

One important point to take note is that most humans perhaps reflect some in-built natural truths, that are adjudged to be true by all sane person who conscious of every happenings in their environment or locality. For example, let’s consider this natural law that says "Thou shalt not murder". This law has been in existence for a very long time, but yet this doesn’t make it non-consequential in our contemporary laws. This is important because virtually all human cultures throughout history have the same thinking and disposition to murder.

When considering the laws as peculiar to each society, the general believe is that every human behaviour and interactions should be guided by a sense of right and wrong. This inner guide is known as the conscience or the super-ego, which is the result of social and psychological processes collectively known as "socialization". But socialization itself is contingent, in the sense that we have described. It cannot serve as a rigorous, objective benchmark. Itself a product of cultural accumulation and conditioning, it should be no more self-evident than the very laws with which it tries to imbue the persons to whom it is applied.

Whether laws are contingent or not, the simple truth is that laws are made and are present to the public and whether you like it or not, you have to abide by it. Though in some instances, some don’t even know anything about laws because it is not accessible to them. This may be attributed to being illiterate or have not had the opportunity to assimilate the legal jargon or because of being poor. I would like to inform you that even if laws were uniformly accessible to everybody yet the interpretation would not have been.

In many legal systems, precedents and court decisions contribute immensely to the process of law making. Hence, there is no such thing as a perfect law. Different methods are adopted to make laws; that is, laws evolve, grow, and in most cases are replaced by others, which better reflect mores and beliefs, values and fears, in general the public psychology are put into consideration and mediated upon by the legislators before viable laws are made available to the society.

This necessitated the reason why some class of professionals come together and work towards how to make it their main business to keep up with the legal evolution and revolutions. This group of people are called lawyers.

Lawyers are highly intelligent, brave, learned and hard-working set of people who have devoted the better part of their lives to the study of laws to ensure that every individual who doesn’t know anything about laws benefited immensely from legal services they are made available to everybody.

It is clearly evident that not everybody can afford the services of these lawyers. In this regard, this signifies that many do not have ample access to the latest (and relevant) versions of the law. Nor would it be true to say that there is no convincing way to pierce one's mind in order to ascertain whether he did know the law in advance or not. 

The simple truth about law is that every offender should be tried according to the severity of the offense committed in accordance to the provisions of the law. Being ignorant of the laws is not tenable and not permissible as defense in the court of law. Every offender should be tried, prosecuted and punished according to the provisions of the law. Punishment has to be served whether you're versed in the laws or not. 

Thank you.