What is the legal theory behind the view that government seizing private assets is not an act of violence? I am curious about the origins of the view that seizing private tangible assets does not amount to an act of violence. To see that this is not a universal view, one need not look further than Machiavelli's quote &quot;a man will sooner forget his father's death than the loss of his estate.&quot; Indeed most criminal activity revolves around illegal acquisition of property. So it's hardly a far-fetched view that people risk life and limb to gain property. And yet it is common for governments to impose &quot;civil&quot; penalties in the forms of &quot;fees&quot; and &quot;fines&quot; without the type of administrative review that is imposed on most forms incarceration. It hardly needs explaining that loss of property results in a loss of ability to transact and obtain life-sustaining materials. This constitutes delayed harm to physical well-being. Surely this must have been a matter of some public debate before this type of view has become universally adopted. I am not asking about any one particular jurisdiction, but I am curious how this view has come to be in most &quot;modern&quot; countries.
The issue is not whether it is an &quot;act of violence&quot;. The fundamental political theory of classically liberal capitalist democracies is that the state has a monopoly on the use of force and violence, or at least, is entitled to assert one if it wishes to do so. But it is recognized as a matter of political theory that the use of force and violence and the credible threat of it, is necessary to secure good order and fairness and justice in society (and from outsiders attacking the society), and to encourage people to act appropriately towards each other. In a classical liberal capitalist democracy, this monopoly on the use of force and violence is regulated and made less abusive by providing that neither liberty or property can be taken by the state without due process of law (except in certain well defined exigent circumstances where due process is provided after the fact). The nuances of what due process is required is what differs. Overall, more due process is required for more serious deprivations, and less is required for less serious deprivations since the consequences of getting it wrong are smaller and don't justify the dead weight loss of more expensive litigation in the same way. Generally, incarceration is deemed to be more serious than a fine or money judgment as explained below, so it needs more due process protections. So, the issue is that interference with personal liberty is taken more seriously than interference with property, and the answer comes from understanding why the former is more serious than the latter. At its heart, this is a widely shared normative view. And, in U.S. constitutional law, this isn't an all or nothing proposition. For example, short deprivations of liberty (incarceration for six months or less) are penalties that a state or local government may take without a jury trial, while longer deprivations of liberty carry with them the right to trial by jury, and moderate to severe deprivations of liberty (typically felonies punishable by three or more years) typically carry with them the right to an evidentiary preliminary hearing before a judge prior to a trial on the merits before a jury that is not available for less serious offenses. Similarly, there is not an absolute right to counsel at state expense in all proceedings in which an indigent defendant might be incarcerated. When the case is prosecuted by a government official, this is the case, but when someone facts potential incarceration for willfully disobeying a court order until that person complies (contempt of court) and the case is prosecuted by a private litigant (possibly pro se), there is not a U.S. Constitutional right to counsel. In the same vein, there are weaker due process protections for someone accused of a pre-trial release rule violation, violation of jail or prison rules, probation violation, parole violations, and requests to be released on parole, when they are already under some form of correctional supervision, even though they can result in longer periods of incarceration, than there are someone living their daily life faces potential criminal punishment. I can't piece together exactly how this came to be, and the legal theory literature is rather thin and not wildly referred to by practitioners. But a couple of key historical points come to mind. One is that due process protections for moderate to serious felony offense criminal defendants were historically important, because certainly as of the 18th century in common law jurisdictions, the death penalty was routinely imposed for offenses that did not cause the death of the victim, such as burglary, robbery, and rape, in part, because the governments of these societies didn't have the economic resources necessary to incarcerate serious criminals for long enough periods of time to protect the public from recidivism and to adequately deter the conduct in the first place. While the line between property and liberty may be debatable, no one would seriously doubt that the historic divide between loss of life and loss of property clearly called for more due process protections against loss of life. A second is that in the late 18th century and early 19th century, a political movement arose to oppose debtor's prisons (and the related civil remedy called &quot;body execution&quot;), as disproportionate and inefficient. Prior to that time, one remedy of a creditor against someone who failed to pay a debt was to have them thrown into a &quot;debtor's prison&quot; or &quot;work house&quot; where they were placed in involuntary servitude until the debt was paid in full. Essentially, the moral argument was that being poor should not be a ground for being incarcerated and simple failure to pay a contactual debt routinely involves merely being poor. In the U.S., Congress outlawed debtors prisons in 1833. The 14th Amendment adopted after the U.S. Civil War, prohibited not just slavery, but involuntary servitude for failure to pay debts, when indentured involuntary servitude to pay costs of an apprenticeship or a passage to the Americas from the Old World, had been common in the colonial period, and into the early 19th century. In 1983 the Supreme Court ruled that in order to jail a person for failure to pay a fine or fee, the judge must first consider if the person was 'willfully' choosing not to pay. Closely related to this, which was a fairly new idea in the 18th century, was the idea of making the discharge of debts that a debtor has no reasonable ability to repay from the debtor's assets or earnings in the short term, routinely available as a matter of right in a court bankruptcy proceeding. Thus, weaker due process protections for monetary debts is backstopped by the fact that the harshness of this is limited by the fact that the debts can often be wiped out in bankruptcy if they are excessive, and that even if they can't be discharged in bankruptcy, that modern limits on the assets and income from which debts can be collected, almost automatically makes such debts survivable for a debtor. So, the risk of doing too much harm with an erroneous judgment is mitigated. Also, keep in mind that most money judgments and fines are compensatory in nature, are a rough justice approximation of compensation, or are proportionate to the seriousness of the harm done in the view of democratically elected legislators, acting collectively, who are presumed to be reasonable. If you deprive someone of property, for example, by failing to repay money loaned, or by destroying their property, taking a like amount of money or property from you seems like simple justice that doesn't call for close scrutiny, whether that comes in the form of a civil money judgment or a criminal restitution award. Similarly, most fines, for things like illegal parking, traffic violations, or minor municipal ordinance violations, are petty. Often they are less than one day's pay for the defendant, and hence, much less serious that depriving someone of liberty for more than a few hours. It is patently less severe. Also, the severity of a money judgment or fine bears a relationship to the ability of someone facing it to pay it. Typically, people who can afford cars can also afford parking tickets and traffic fines. Typically, people who drive cars are required to get insurance to pay meaningful amounts of money to people harmed if they have accidents. Typically, creditors only extend credit to people for whom it is not to burdensome to repay the debt. Typically, homeowners can afford to pay fines for municipal ordinance violations for failing to mow their lawns. In Northern Europe, there is an effort to reconcile the economic impact of incarceration on someone to presumptive prison sentences, with a system of &quot;day-fines&quot; where an offense is deemed to justify a prison sentence of up to X days, and that is converted to a fine equal to one day's wages for the defendant times the number of days (sentences imposed with the full due process protections of criminal defendants). This prevents the state from having to incur great expense to incarcerate someone who has already burden society by breaking its rules, and instead has the opposite economic effect on the state. It also prevents the community ties of the defendant from being disrupted and prevents criminal defendants from being unduly influenced by other offenders who would be incarcerated with that defendant potentially leading all involved to commit more future crimes. And, paying a fine still leaves a defendant with considerable liberty to interact with friends and family, enjoy low cost entertainment options, and move about where he or she desires. Incarceration deprives the offender of income, and also imposes all sorts of limitations on the defendant. One could imagine a system, like the day-fine system, where many fines that are punishment in excess of mere compensation or good approximation of it for the harm done are routinely as several in impact to a defendant as incarceration is to a defendant. But the U.S. does not have such a system. Punitive fines authorized by law are very rarely even remotely as severe as typical sentences of incarceration for the crimes for which those fines are authorized, when committed by natural persons. So, since fines, while they could be more severe than incarceration in a hypothetical legal system, rarely are in most non-day fine legal regimes, affording maximal due process protections in cases of incarceration but not monetary punishment flows naturally from the mere fact that incarceration, in practice, is almost always a more severe punishment, and because a bright line rule is easier to apply even in the rare cases when a fine might be more serious than incarceration. Greater due process in more severe cases makes sense because inaccurate judicial imposition or non-imposition of punishment in minor matters is less of a big deal than in very serious matters. Finally, it is worth noting that incarceration is usually reserved for offenses in which the typical defendant would be utterly incapable of providing money compensation, because the harm done is so great. Criminal offenses punishable by incarceration are designed for instances of &quot;incalculable harm&quot; that can't be made right with the defendant's money, while civil offenses are generally chosen as a policy option in cases where the harm caused in manageable relative to the ability of someone to make it right with a compensatory payment and/or a fine or punitive damages that proportionately compares to the harm done that is not merely economic in some way. The notion that incalculable harms are more serious and hence more important to get right, than those which are measurable and compensable, again, argues for greater due process protections in incarceration cases. (Another area where due process protections are similarly great is in termination of parental rights cases, by the way, which implicate similarly serious and incalculable harm matters.) I know that this lacks citation, but it does go a bit to illustrating the motivating ideas.
It's generally correct in the American system that everything not forbidden is permitted. But the law you're looking at isn't really an exception. You have the legal right to tamper with evidence if tampering is not illegal, but this statute makes it illegal. The language you've highlighted merely says that the law does not apply to those who have some other affirmative grant of authority to do so. So if you stab someone to death in your kitchen, you can't remove the body or other evidence, but the detectives investigating the case can, because they have the legal authority to process the scene and maintain the evidence for trial. So the law is similar to the &quot;speaking in public&quot; hypothetical, but that doesn't make it meaningless. Because of the First Amendment, that law doesn't actually outlaw anything, but the tampering law faces no such legal barriers. You had the right to tamper until the government said you didn't. Now that it says you don't, you can only do it on the government's terms, which require an affirmative grant of authority.
When a person unlawfully kills someone else they have committed a crime against the state (murder, manslaughter etc.) and a civil wrong (a tort) against the victim (specifically, the tort of wrongful death). The state responds with charging the perpetrator with a crime and attempting to prove that they did the deed "beyond reasonable doubt". If convicted the criminal is "punished" by incarceration or death or a fine or community service etc. The victim (through their estate) or other affected people (family, dependents etc.) can respond by suing the perpetrator for compensation (money) for the damage they caused. If the plaintiff proves their case "on the balance of probabilities" the perpetrator will owe the plaintiffs whatever damages the court awards. There are many crime/tort mirrors (many have the same name): theft and conversion, trespass and trespass, fraud and fraud, kidnapping and false imprisonment etc. Because of the different threshold of proof between criminal and civil liability, it is much easier to win a civil case.
On the contrary there are hundreds of federal statutes that sanction civil forfeiture, as well as 18 U.S.C. § 983 (and other subsections inter alia) that governs civil forfeiture. What you seem to be more concerned with is the judicial oversight and regulations around civil forfeiture. The burden of proof varies between, and within, states - in some, prima facie/probable cause is all that is required, in others, a preponderance of evidence, or clear and convincing evidence is required. Just three states require proof beyond a reasonable doubt and civil forfeiture is only illegal in New Mexico. Civil forfeiture is subject to judicial review: a list of notable cases in civil forfeiture is available on Wikipedia. Here's some of the more interestingly-named ones: Marcus v. Search Warrant One 1958 Plymouth Sedan v. Pennsylvania Marcus v. Search Warrant held that the search and seizure procedures in that case lacked safeguards for due process, freedom of speech, and freedom of press. One 1958 Plymouth Sedan v. Pennsylvania held because the vehicle was searched without a warrant, and the untaxed liquor found thereby was used to invoke the forfeiture, the forfeiture was illegal (the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures). So, what is the legal framework? Broadly speaking, 18 U.S.C 983, as well as state legislation. What recourse is there? Judicial review. However, the procedures vary between jurisdictions.
The money is forfeited to the state This would normally be the case even if Daniel is acquitted. The proceeds of crime may be seized using forfeiture rules which require Daniel to prove that the suspect money is legitimate.
Because your legal fees and contract damages are not "in addition to" your risk; they are your risk. If you pay the retainer and lose, you don't lose anything more than the retainer and damages. If you pay the retainer and win, you don't win anything more than the retainer and damages. The only kind of argument I can see here is that you're incurring some kind of psychic cost by enduring the uncertainty surrounding the litigation, but I can't remember ever seeing a case -- in Florida or elsewhere -- in which the court recognized taking on risk as a compensable harm, especially in a contract case, where damages are much more limited than in other kinds of cases. Risk is just a necessary feature of an adversarial legal system.
As for a member of the Universal Postal Union, what repercussions will occur for country B? None. Are they allowed to keep stealing stuff at the sender insurer's expense? Well, country B isn't stealing stuff. Bad actors in the employe of country B are stealing stuff. This is a matter for law enforcement in country B. If country B is endemically corrupt as seems to be implied, then it is likely that the bad actors will continue to be bad actors. As for the insurer, they are in the business of selling insurance against theft (among other things) and they will take this into account in setting their premiums. Will they face any penalties (e.g. banned from the Union) that would encourage them to hold their customs to account? All member countries of the UN are entitled to be members of the UPU and it seems unlikely that such minor issues could lead to expulsion from the UN - nation-states that have committed genocide are still UN members after all. Since the UPU appears to produce more upsides than downsides, being one of, if not the single most successful and universally adopted international treaty in history this is just one of the minor annoyances.
The question is oddly phrased: The law does not give allowances for its violation. Many laws have exceptions. E.g., the law against killing endangered animals contains an exception for defensive killings. Perhaps you are thinking of safe harbors? For example, there are general provisions in the law like "exigent circumstances" that allow police to proceed with actions that, absent those provisions, would constitute violations of law. "Permission" to violate a right can be granted explicitly in the form of a warrant, which allows law enforcement to "violate" specific property and freedom rights. Finally, one might consider an executive pardon or jury-nullification to be ex post "permission to break the law."