What is the principle that children can consent to other children of the same age, but not to an adult, called? Two three year old children that agree on &quot;playing doctor&quot; and examining each others bodies, including genitalia are not committing a crime (but if one three year old child forces another three year old it is a crime, although it will be a case for the parents/psychologist/school counsellor not the police). Two 13 year old children/adolescents that consent to have sex are not committing a crime (there are some weird exceptions, particularly in America, where holding a nude photo of yourself is considered child pornography but that is an exception). Furthermore, two 13 year olds can enter a contract if it is &quot;reasonable&quot; for their age, e.g., maybe €/$ 30-50 or so. However, if one party in all those situations was 25, it would be illegal because children can't consent or enter binding contracts with an adult (for substantial amounts of money). Is the principle described above called something? How old is it? Did the Romans apply a similar concept? The medieval Catholic church?
The exception is often called a Romeo and Juliet exception colloquially when applied to statutory rape laws. See, e.g. here. It is an exception to the age of capacity to consent to sexual conduct, not an exception to the capacity to consent to a contract. When children are very young (typically in the range of 7 to 12 as set by statute of common law, it is 6 in North Carolina) they lack the capacity to commit a crime, which has to do with the age of the offender and not the mutual ages of those involved. Is the principle described above called something? How old is it? Did the Romans apply a similar concept? The medieval Catholic church? The principle that you described is a misunderstanding of the law and is incorrect. No jurisdiction has adopted it in the sense that you articulate. When these instances are not punishable as crimes they are not punishable for different reasons. So, the question of &quot;how old is it?&quot; is a category error that has no answer. The medieval Catholic church did not have any criminal or contract jurisprudence. Both of those domains were handled by secular officials, usually either feudal lords or the officials of a &quot;free city&quot;. In the medieval period, feudal secular law was often arbitrary and often came down to the personal whims of the individual holding the title. As @hmvsm appropriately notes, however, it did have doctrine about when a child was morally responsible for sins, but final adjudication of whether you sinned or not was ultimately determined in the afterlife, and the church doctrine of forgiveness of sins made the issue moot to a great extent. The Roman Empire, of course, did have secular laws, but its laws in the area of contractual capacity, which are largely replicated by modern European civil codes, didn't contain the principle that you propose. To the best of my knowledge, the modern concept of statutory rape was unknown in the Roman world. The lack of hard age based cutoffs was, in part, because vital statistics record keeping was nowhere near universal, so many people did not even know their exact age in a legally provable manner. Approximate age in the very late Roman Empire would often have been determined based upon time elapsed since an infant baptism as recorded by church officials, but Christianity went from being very rare to universal between about 275 CE and 450 CE, and Rome fell not long after that point.
The "Right to Party" as defined by the organization known as "The Beastie Boys" is not defined in any portion of their discourse on the matter of the "Right to Party". Rather, the entire discourse poetically describes a youth, presumably under the legal adult age of 18 (given restrictions on smoking cigarettes and owning adult literature in the second verse), who faces restrictions upon his or her rights by his legal guardians, in this case a mother, father, and teacher. Whereas the dictionary definition of the verb form of "Party" is defined by Oxford Dictionary as "Enjoying oneself at a party or other lively gathering, typically with drinking and music." As established, the subject of the proposed treaty on this right is legally barred from drinking, though a party may exist without alcohol and thus would not prevent the subject from engaging in an act of partying. A party or lively gathering would meat the definition of "Freedom of Peaceful Assembly" under the First Amendment Rights of the United States Constitution as well as "Freedom of Association" under the same amendment. Said party may additionally be for any purpose so long as it is peaceful. The state may impose reasonable restrictions on the party, such as noise ordinances, age based restrictions on minors including "Adult Contents", cigarettes and alchohol, as discussed. While typcial, they're absence does not prevent the assembly from rising to the level of "party" as previous defined. Beastie Boys contends that the restrictions place upon the subject of their discourse on the Right to Party is unreasonably restricted by the confiscation of several items, enforced school requirements, and dress code as defined by the legal guardian in their right as authority of the youth's rights. Beastie Boys offers little evidence that these restrictions are unreasonable or prevent the subject from "partying" as defined above. Beastie Boys do propose that the authority known as the father can not restrict the use of cigarettes by the youth as the father "smokes two packs a day". While Beastie Boys is correct that this meets the definition of hypocritical, the father is assumed to be of legal age to purchase cigarettes and is legal allowed to restrict access to them based on reasonable age restrictions and possible heath risks the father wishes to prevent in the youth that he may or may not be suffering from. As there are no formal requirements for a peaceful assembly to rise to the level of party, it can be presumed that these restrictions would not affect the party as defined. It should also be noted that in the Beastie Boys discourse, that the authority figure referred to as mother did not restrict the youths ability to listen to the content of the discourse, nor were any restrictions described tailored in such a fashion as to restrict the discourse specifically. While there is no amendment defining the right to party in the United States Constitution, the 9th Amendment does clearly state that citizens rights are not enumerated in the constitution and other rights not discussed in the constitution may exists and be claimed by the individual. From an originalist standpoint, it is widely accept that a good number of The Framers of the Constitution quite frequently met the accepted definition of the phrase "Drunk off their Ass" and thus, would not reasonably be against what can be defined as a "party". Additionally, many were participants in an event that was known as the "Tea Party", which was agreed by many to be quite the lively gathering at its time and was still viewed as quite the "radical" affair of the day, many wearing costumes such as those who attended in clothing traditional of Native Americans. They were also most likely not drunk during the course of this party. Thus, the intent of the framers was never to restrict or deniegn such a right Thus, a reasonable court in the United States would hold that the Right to Party does exist for all U.S. citizens and is inalienable. Beastie Boys also argues that it is acceptable to fight for one's right to party. This does not conflict with the First Amendment Right to petition government for grievances so long as it is again a peaceable affair. Given the poetic nature of the discourse, we can presume that "Fight" would mean to defend or struggle in a non-violent manor for such a right. This is backed up through originalism as the restrictions placed on many citizens of Boston for their actions during the Tea Party were subsequently fought against for many years, culminating in the Constitution. Thus, it can be assumed that the United States does recognize the right of the people to party and the right of the people to fight for the aforementioned right. This right would still be subject to reasonable time, manner, and place restrictions so long as said restrictions are content neutral to the message of the party.
Firstly, this is actually a really good question - The Australian Constitution grants few explicit protections or rights to people, and it does not protect you from discrimination on the basis of age. In any case, you'll find that it is not a violation of the Age Discrimination Act 2004 (Cth) - see s39. This makes an exemption, amongst others, to the Act when acting in compliance with specified Commonwealth laws, or with State or Territory Acts or Regulations, which typically enact minimum drinking ages. In general, governments are able to legislate within the bounds of their powers, usually as enumerated in a constitution, and sometimes limited by a bill of rights. Even where the power to legislate with respect to age is not specifically granted, governments are generally empowered to legislate with respect to other matters where age may be a factor: employment, sale of goods, gambling, etc.
Yes. In a civil case, there are two parties and the case is about finding out who has which obligations to whom. In a civil case, the plaintiff has to prove that they actually incurred damage through the actions of the defendant. A criminal case is the state vs. the defendant. The "wronged party" is the society as a whole, usually represented by the prosecutor. The victim, if there is one, just plays the role of yet another witness to find out if the defendant needs to be punished and how. There are also examples of crimes which are completely victimless but still punished by some societies. For example, in many places sexual intercourse between two consenting adult siblings is a crime (incest), even though there is no victim. Also, for some crimes it is even a crime to attempt to commit it. So one can be punished in a criminal court even though they didn't actually succeed in causing any damage to anyone. Example: I throw a rock at your car. When I hit, you can sue me in a civil court and force me to pay for the repairs. When I miss, I caused no damage to you, so there is nothing you could sue about. But what if I throw a rock at you and miss? That's attempted assault, maybe even attempted murder. When law enforcement finds out about it, I could be arrested, prosecuted and convicted to a prision sentence, even though you are perfectly fine.
It may depend on what offences are suspected of being committed. One example is: In the united-states under 18 U.S. Code § 2258A an Electronic Service Provider (ESP) is required to report apparent violations of sections: 2251 [Sexual exploitation of children] 2251A [Selling or buying of children] 2252 [material involving the sexual exploitation of minors] 2252A [material constituting or containing child pornography] 2252B [Misleading domain names with intent] 2260 [sexually explicit depictions of a minor etc] The report is made to the National Center for Missing &amp; Exploited Children (NCMEC) who in turn forward the information to the relevant domestic or foreign law enforcement agency. The ESP is protected from commiting distribution or related offences when making the report by virtue of subsection (g)(4): Permitted disclosure by a provider.— A provider that submits a report under subsection (a)(1) may disclose by mail, electronic transmission, or other reasonable means, information, including visual depictions contained in the report, in a manner consistent with permitted disclosures under paragraphs (3) through (8) of section 2702(b) only to a law enforcement agency described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) of paragraph (3), to NCMEC, or as necessary to respond to legal process.
Ignorantia juris non excusat You can say I didn't know: it won't keep you out of jail. Rather than delving into the specifics of your question, I will keep my answer general. If you break the law, you break the law. It doesn't matter if: you don't know what the law is, you didn't think the law applied to you, you thought what you were doing was in accordance with the law. "Break the law" is an objective fact - there is no subjectivity involved. The state of mind of the person is, in most jurisdictions, irrelevant; the common law doctrine of mens rea or "the guilty mind" has almost universally been done away with. Now specific offences have specific defences. Generally, in underage sex cases genuine ignorance of the age of the person is one such defence. A court may decide that ignorance that the person was underage under US law may qualify for this defence.
It's probably due to GDPR. You will see that around 2018-05-25 when GDPR came into force, many US-based websites changed their terms of service to increase the age requirement from 13 (age below which the U.S. COPPA law applies) to 16 for European users. For example, here are Stack Exchange's terms of service from 2018-05-02, mentioning 13 years, and here is the version one day later mentioning 16 years. The GPDR allows companies to process personal data under a variety of legal bases, such as “legitimate interest”, “necessary for performing a contract”, or “consent”. But children are not able to give consent in this context. If a website wants consent from a child for some data processing, Art 8 GDPR requires the service to make “reasonable efforts” to check with the parents first. This reasonable effort is more effort than just banning children from using the services. The GDPR itself does not define exactly when someone is a child for these purposes – it lets individual EU member states define the exact age limit, which may be anything between 13 and 16 years. Thus, websites that definitely do not want to have to comply with Art 8 GDPR take the upper bound of that limit and mention in their terms of service that the service is only intended for persons aged 16 or older. The text of Art 8 GDPR is: (1) Where point (a) of Article 6(1) applies, in relation to the offer of information society services directly to a child, the processing of the personal data of a child shall be lawful where the child is at least 16 years old. Where the child is below the age of 16 years, such processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child. Member States may provide by law for a lower age for those purposes provided that such lower age is not below 13 years. (2) The controller shall make reasonable efforts to verify in such cases that consent is given or authorised by the holder of parental responsibility over the child, taking into consideration available technology. (3) Paragraph 1 shall not affect the general contract law of Member States such as the rules on the validity, formation or effect of a contract in relation to a child.
It depends on the jurisdiction and particular facts. The long history of not counting marriage as prostitution under law because of its social and religious legitimacy makes the transaction-related aspects of marriage fall outside the definition of prostitution in most cases that are not the explicit sale of a person for consideration, which is obviously forbidden as slavery today and could probably also be charged as prostitution in most jurisdictions. In your particular example, the girl is also saying what things will influence how she feels, and no reasonable person would say that she gives up her ability to withhold consent after marriage based on any alleged contract. A contract to lose the ability to withhold consent would also be void as against public policy, regardless of whether prostitution is involved. Bitcoin is a form of virtual currency. It is regulated by money transmitter law and trading it to obtain goods or services that cannot legally be traded for is still illegal. It's not that there is a defined "limit." It's that some things will fit into the definition and others won't. It's about categories, not quantities.