Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your willingness to persevere exceeds the willingness of society to punish you This is exactly the situation that I don't think Kerr's article addresses. He appears to assume that it will always be possible to deter civil disobedience with some punishment that is within reasonable bounds. The question by gnosis that started this whole subthread was basically, what if that assumption is not true? There are only two…
I agree with most of what you say, but with two quibbles. The punishments suggested by sentencing guidelines encapsulate what precedent says is "reasonable limits". Thus the sentencing guidelines in some sense are the definition of what our society thinks of as reasonable limits. That said, you go on to say that that sentence is way beyond reasonable in almost anybody's estimation. If your circle contains lots of peo…
Re: The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz – Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion
#141Well, Orin Kerr is at least one lawyer who appears to think that the current sentencing limits are unreasonable, at least in some cases. :-) (More precisely, he thinks the current sentencing guidelines are too coarse; they don't differentiate well between different types of cases that deserve very different guidelines.)
But you're right, different subgroups of the population can have very different ideas of what is reasonable.