The whole point of the EU single market is that you do not have to do that. You can set up shop in Ireland and sell to the French market until the cows come home. You only owe Irish taxes (modulo the recent completely crazy VAT changes).
Laws that say "forget the law, anything we think is unreasonable is illegal" are a growing problem in Europe. It makes the EU look like fools to the rest of the world when something as basic as the rule of law becomes flaky and unpredictable. France is not just causing itself problems with this kind of action, their greed will create a bad impression of the whole of the EU.
Not trying to start a flamewar here, but the common German/European perspective on the US legal system consists of corporations owning it (because of huge costs), consumers abusing it ("cat in microwave/washing machine/toaster", unreasonable compensations, class action lawsuits) and agencies outright ignoring it.
Edit: Remembered one more: Juries deciding whether murderers are guilty or not. Simply unthinkable over here. Ironically the horror of this scenario is fuelled by the US/Hollywood itself.
Edit 2: War on drugs / world's highest prison population / racial profiling / death sentence. The longer I think about it, the worse it gets. I think I made my point. The image is really, really bad.
When that finally starts to happen in the USA, you can count on me being in the streets protesting.
Edit: You may also want to consider the current practices in Germany regarding frivolous law suits against websites. We aren't the only country with this problem. So is every place.
And it's not like that in France either. You have to take into account that some HN users are real experts on U.S legal matters, whereas most European legal matters are discussed on here without much if any professional legal expertise.
Can you elaborate?
Thus in prison for life because their 3rd minor crime tips them over 3 strikes?
How oddly specific....were you referencing this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMH8Tof69SE
I do agree the U.S has a problem with rather frivulious lawsuits over "not following the letter of the law" or "wasn't mentioned in the safety manual to not do this thing that should have been common sense".
It seems when people think "American legal system" things like this come to mind: http://i.imgur.com/D7aP2bT.png
If I remember correctly though, the silliness of the above is actually due to a law about packaging must contain allergen information for certain common allergies. This means even peanuts must contain the label in order to comply with the law. Rather than list exceptions and complicate the law, it applies broadly to everything.
IANAL, I may not be remembering this fact 100% correctly.
Okay, I'm curious. What's this supposed to mean? That consumers are putting cats in those devices and getting away with it, or putting cats in those devices to void warranties or something?
The best I can come up with is that you are thinking of cat in the microwave, which is an urban legend. I'm not sure how that's affecting the view of the US legal system.
Combine that with uncapped and ridiculously high compensation claims plus class action lawsuits, which are not a thing over here, and you get a comical impression.
As I said, this may not be totally true, but even though the European Commission brings up stupid ideas once in a while ("Let's introduce quotas for netflix!"), I would say on the global scale the image of the EU legal system is quite okay.
Maybe not in Germany, but France has juries for murder case since 1810, actually, a jury is theoretically mandatory for any case where a sentence of more than 10 years in prison is possible. The accused cannot waive this "right" like in some cases in the US. (in practice, because juries take a lot of court time, are shaky and difficult to manage, prosecutors often will prosecute a serious crime like a less serious similar one to avoid having to go in front of a jury (e.g. instead of prosecuting something as rape, do it as if it was sexual assault). The prosecutor must have the agreement of the victim and the accused to do it).
Also, it's not only France. Austria, Greece, Italy, Belgium and others have that sort of jury.
Well, that might be unthinkable in Germany, but its clearly not in Europe as a whole, since we got that from a place in Europe that hasn't abandoned it in the time since their system migrated to North America.
The UK is clearly an outlier. They also drive on the wrong side of the road and have a strange relationship to the metric system :D
Can you clarify? A jury trial is supposed to benefit the defendant.
I am not a lawyer and there are good articles discussing the system, I think lawsuits can often be highly complex and should be handled by professionals, not amateurs. I believe if you look guilty you are better of with professionals, who I imagine are more likely to judge you based on facts instead of sympathy.
Seems to me that it's pretty damned important to be sure that someone is guilty before you lock them up for life. But that just might be my american bias showing through.
A panel of 3 judges. Or properly randomly selected juries. The US system, with a mix of weirdly selected judges and bizarre jury selection seems to be sub-optimal.
The US uses Juries because as a check on government power. The whole point is jury nullification not factual accuracy.
In the case of murder trials (three professional judges, two lay judges), you need four votes, because three would be less than the required two thirds.
That's basically how all Anglo-Saxon (including the US) law, i.e. case law, looks like.
In the criminal context, we also have the rule of leniety, which holds that ambiguities in criminal laws are resolved in favor of the defendant.
It's unusual to encounter a situation where the law is clear but someone is punished based on vague case law interpretation of the law. I rarely see a situation where I think "the Court just botched interpreting this statute." Almost always, it's "Congress or the agency botched writing this statute or regulation." And in a civil system it's much harder for the courts to fix such problems.
We do have a problem with laws that are themselves unclear, but the Supreme Court has done some weed cleaning in that area. For example, Jeffrey Skilling got a reduced sentence because the Supreme Court found that the honest services fraud statute was unconstitutionally vague unless limited to strict "bribery and kickbacks" theory. In the area of fraud on the government, courts have held that defendants can only be punished for making incorrect statements to the government (for e.g. Medicaire claims) if the falsity of their statements is based on an unreasonable and not merely incorrect interpretation of the underlying regulations.
We also generally have a strong separation between civil suits and criminal suits. People lament that not enough people go to prison in the white collar world, but in my opinion it's a good thing we're not sending people to prison for misunderstanding Treasury or Fed regulations.
This is all nice in theory, but in practice, it's happened multiple times that the (Supreme Court's) interpretation of the same law has changed. Granted, this has happened over decades (or even generations), but this implies that (1) either the definition of what is "reasonable" has changed (I find this unlikely, or else the concept itself has little sense), or (2) there is more wiggle room when interpreting laws...
For the amount of love Hayek gets in these circles, I'm surprised there isn't more focus on Law, Legislation and Liberty
I mean that's basically the entire cause of the split in the Supreme Court between strict literalists and those who believe in a living constitution.
Obviously judges have to apply some degree of common sense because English is inherently vague, but the amount that they do it can still trigger political bun fights.
Edit: of course, the right for an Irish company to do business anywhere in Europe is also one that can be abused. Separate companies are not needed for rights to be abused and offices to be raided.
Not only workers hired in France wouldn't want an Irish contract, but you can only have "posted workers" for a temporary period.
which is a big design fault that hampers the EU especially as nations facing debt problems will use it to shore their finances up which keeps up and coming countries from doing that, being up and coming.
E.g. Germany can only hold its current EU stronghold by outcompeting France with much lower labor costs.
I think you have an unsophisticated view of legal systems. Law consists of more than just what is written into the text of legislation. It is a historical practice done by people working in courts and in law enforcement. It interacts with the people as they serve on juries. Law is a living thing bound in tradition and culture.
This has been occurring in European law since time immemorial -- giving the judicial branch maximum discretion is viewed as democratizing.
It is hardly growing rather than being slowly exposed.
> Laws that say "forget the law, anything we think is unreasonable is illegal"
Don't look up Scotland's declaratory power if this bothers you. It strikes me as totally reasonable.
Like password vs fingerprint
