{"id":1000016,"date":"2006-05-10T13:43:51","date_gmt":"2006-05-10T18:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/politics\/2006\/05\/10\/how-tennessee-screws-consumers\/"},"modified":"2008-05-28T15:16:36","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T20:16:36","slug":"how-tennessee-screws-consumers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/politics\/2006\/05\/10\/how-tennessee-screws-consumers\/","title":{"rendered":"How Tennessee Screws Consumers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While surfing the Web to find the exact text of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2006\/05\/10\/how-tennessee-protects-consumers\/\">Tennessee law that requires companies to extend warranty protection for the amount of time a product spends in repair<\/a>, I found this gem on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.state.tn.us\/consumer\/law.html\">website of the Tennessee Dept. of Commerce and Insurance<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n LexisNexis Law publishes the Tennessee Code Annotated. This is the only company authorized to publish Tennessee Consumer Laws on the Internet.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>How much you want to bet that LexisNexis paid off the legislature in Tennessee to give them the exclusive rights to publish the law all Tennessee citizens are governed by?<\/p>\n<p>One of the most basic rights, one so fundamental that we rarely even think about it, is the right to know the laws by which we are governed. This is actually one of the oldest rights in common law, one that goes back not even to the Magna Carta, but <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Twelve_Tables\">to the Roman Republic<\/a>! That&#8217;s how basic this one is. Even the tyrannical, slave-holding, god-fearing, militaristic Romans accepted this right. <\/p>\n<p>But not Lexis-Nexis or the state of Tennessee! They see nothing wrong with making the basic text of the law we&#8217;re governed by the private property of one company. <\/p>\n<p>Not surprisingly when I tried to visit the LexisNexis web site to read the law, the site failed to load. Apparently it requires Java or something equally pointless. LexisNexis has lots of money for lawyers and lobbyists I&#8217;m sure, but not one penny for competent web design.<\/p>\n<p>If I were a citizen of Tennessee I think I might feel compelled to commit a bit of civil disobedience by republishing that text myself. As is, since I&#8217;m not, I think I&#8217;ll leave that to the good people of Tennessee. However I am starting to wonder if LexisNexis has succeeded in bribing the legislature here in New York.? I&#8217;ll have to check on that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While surfing the Web to find the exact text of the Tennessee law that requires companies to extend warranty protection for the amount of time a product spends in repair, I found this gem on the website of the Tennessee Dept. of Commerce and Insurance: LexisNexis Law publishes the Tennessee Code Annotated. This is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}