Hard disagree. Just because you don’t understand the rationale of a law doesn’t mean it is arbitrary and disconnected from your safety or best interest.
I’ll give a concrete example. In law school I was hired to write a memo on a traffic circle. There was a very deliberate and effective approach to identifying where pedestrian crossings were the safest. And the cross walk itself is an attempt to encourage people to go to the safe areas for crossing.
Cross walks also create a clear zone of liability. If a driver hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk they are deemed at fault. Outside the crosswalk the pedestrian is deemed to have contributed. So the law incentivizes both driver and pedestrian behavior to converge on a known safety pattern in the safer section of the road. So you can jaywalk based on your analysis that it isn’t really that big of a deal or necessary for your safety but at the scale of society the law encourages the safest behavior.
As far as signatures. I would agree there are better systems. But they still serve a valid function.
I had ATT forge mysignature on a contract to try to get me to have to pay an early termination fee. But because I had other documents with my signature I was able to demonstrate that the forgery wasn’t even close to mine. I would honestly rather have that rather than a digital stamp or Docusign.
You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception?
I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit verification it was actually a formal legal block and required several states passing law to make digital signature images legally acceptable. If I had used a library like this to make the document digital signature look like they had been analog at some point it would have been a crime.
So just because you think it’s reasonable doesn’t mean the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of the signature isn’t illegal.
It's just that such cases come down to technical advice that applies to a specific legal environment (certain states you mention), whereas I'm personally more interested in looking at such situations from the ethics, identity, and authenticity perspectives.
That’s fine. I studied philosophy in undergrad and happy to debate those perspectives but I was making a legal argument.