Is a Law Only As Good As Enforcement?

I come bringing a question, what makes something illegal? In a basic sense we would just say anything that goes against, or is banned by a law, but what if the law is never enforced? If you look at the United States government, we have 3 branches, Legislative, Judicial and finally Executive. While the first two are primarily responsible for making the laws, the Executive branches job is the actually enforce them. However what if the executive branch just decides not to then is something not illegal?

In 1832 is when we really saw a huge landmark case, specifically when the supreme court rules that the US government had no right to encroach on Native American lands and push them out. Andrew Jackson, the president at the time, refused to enforce the ruling and continued to claim more territory. Without the backing from the executive branch, the law essentially did not exist. We can see this on much smaller scales within counties or states within the United States. There is a whole book I read as a child dedicated to weird laws, but the vast majority of them are not followed.

An example of one of these weird laws is in Indiana it is illegal to attend a public event or use public transport within 4 hours of eating an onion or garlic. This is a law that is written in the books and has not been repealed, yet the police never enforce it because it is regarded as ridiculous. If we move to laws that might be more severe, position of marijuana in California for a long time was a criminal offense, but it was mostly left up to the police officers discretion whether or not to enforce the law and many did not.

In my opinion a law is only as important as the enforcement that goes behind actually making sure those who break it are held accountable. If there is a large disconnect between the actual people and the legislators who write the laws, they will obviously be meaningless. I talk about this because I often see people talking about what if cryptocurrency was banned by the government to which my response is, lets see if the government can actually enforce the law.

If there are a large amount of people who will use cryptocurrency regardless of what the law says and nobody enforces the law because they think it is stupid, it really carries no weight. Like I said before it technically exists on paper, but so do thousands of laws which no one even acknowledges anymore. The United States in particular has so many laws that I would say very very few people in the entire world even know the ones that exist in their own state let alone the entire country. So I ask that you think about this next time you think about whether something is illegal or not. If the police and government don’t or cant enforce it, I personally am inclined to believe that for all intents and purposes, it isn’t.

Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges