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.



