Everybody Speeds:
Undermining the Rule of Law

ron.ozrock.net

Everybody speeds, all the time. OK, except for the really occasional (typically) old person in a spotless 1974 Plymouth Duster with 30,000 miles and the factory muffler, and he or she is subject to the wrathful contempt of all persons otherwise civilized -- we tailgate, curse, and make all forms of insulting allusions to the virtues of Eskimo culture and Dr. Kevorkian’s waiting list.

There is really nothing quite like it in the rest of our culture. Essentially everybody is in obvious and flagrant violation of a clear, widely posted, and utterly understood law, essentially all the time. And if you have the audacity to buck the trend and abide by the law, you are at significantly increased risk of accident, getting shot, and suffering many milder indignities -- being flipped off, honked at, and “cut off” by your normally civilized fellow adults. The same person who will bend over backwards to make sure they aren’t inadvertently cutting in front of you in line at the supermarket will honk, gesture, and mutually endanger with abandon if you have the gall to do 55 on the freeway, or 30 on the local main street.

Maybe 55 and 30 are too slow for these roads; maybe they aren’t. I’m not sure what the correct speed limits should be. But wherever they’re set, the fact that the social norms of driving require that you constantly exceed the speed limit is disturbing. And the most central way in which this is so disturbing is that it undermines the idea of the rule of law.

The idea of the rule of law (as opposed to the rule of “man”) is that there should be fixed and public laws, and the violation of them should be enforced and punished in a way that doesn’t depend on your relationship to anybody, how much money you make, or whatever. I’m not saying this is the way things always work; look at OJ. But I am saying that it’s what we ought to seek in our justice system, and is one of its most central principles.

One way to undermine the rule of law and turn it into the rule of man is to outlaw something that people will mostly do if the law isn’t enforced, and let the situation emerge where everybody is almost always in technical violation of the laws -- which is exactly the situation with speeding. In fact, it’s even worse than that: It’s not just the case that we’ll all do it because we can “get away” with it. In this case, it’s pretty clear that in most circumstances, speeding about the same amount as everybody else actually serves the purpose of traffic laws -- that is, making car travel safer -- than honoring the letter of the speeding laws. Going 10-15 mph slower than everyone else on the road is going to increase your chance of having an accident, not decrease it. So you and I face a dilemma: Either go 55 and put yourself at risk for everything from accidents caused by the speed differential between you and everybody else, or go 65 and put yourself in a position where any cop, any time, can grab you by the short hairs, and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it, since “but everybody’s doing it!” isn’t actually an effective defense against breaking the law.

So now you’re in a position where the enforcers of the law can lean on anybody they want, whenever they want, because everybody is in violation. Do they lean on everybody? Of course not. If they’re decent, they enforce on the most obvious and egregious violators (like those going 85 or so on the freeway); if they’re not, they enforce on whomever they want, on those they want to harass, when ever they feel like it. In between those extremes, we get the gray areas -- e.g., cops who widely use “pretense” traffic stops to get a closer look inside cars they might find suspicious, like young black men driving in white neighborhoods. However they use this is entirely up to them; since everybody’s “guilty”, they can intrude on anybody, do a visual search of their car, and ticket them . Who gets in trouble, gets searched, etc., is now completely a discretionary matter for those enforcing the law. If that isn’t rule by whim, I don’t know what is.

The solution is obvious: Set reasonable speed limits, and then enforce them fairly but rigidly. But somehow, I doubt that anyone will be rushing to fix the problem in that way. It’s an unfortunate but true fact about us that we tend to care more about the concrete gains of cheating an extra 10 mph over the speed limit than about the more abstract ones of preserving the rule of law. Keep that in mind next time you get a speeding ticket for doing 63 on the highway when those around you are doing 68.