There are a lot of laws, indeed they are growing so fast that not only can they not be read by legislators, but with in creasing frequency not even printed, existing only in electronic form, no longer practical to commit to paper. Further, many of these laws are deliberately overbroad for the convenience of prosecutors
Thus for example Krister Evertson was convicted of abandoning hazardous waste – notwithstanding the fact that the materials were not waste, nor abandoned, nor even stored unsafely. The law is that someone’s materials, if hazardous, can constitute waste even if they are extremely valuable to him and under lock and key in secure storage, and once the EPA has broken into that secure storage using cutting torches, he has abandoned the materials.
A law that on its face appears to be about potentially hazardous chemicals dumped in a creek, also covers potentially hazardous chemicals on private property in locked chemical and criminal resistant stainless steel container. And furthermore, nearly all chemicals have been declared hazardous.
The same is true of an enormous variety of other laws on other matters, laws that now multiply faster than is physically possible to print them – each law written to include all possible behavior that the state might possibly want to punish, not to exclude behavior that is innocent and honest.
The effect is increasingly to give the government the power to arbitrarily imprison anyone at any time, which is lawless power. It is disguised by the appearance of law. The government may imprison anyone at any time, but should anyone truthfully point out that this is lawless power, the government can simply responds, “what do you mean lawless, since you broke such and such law and we are consequently operating within the limits of the law”. Of course society has long tolerated this, for example the use of tax laws to fight organized crime. So this is not new. Anyway it illustrates the inadequacy and superficiality of the usual notion of “rule of law”, which this lawless government satisfies.