And it’s not as if Germans are going to not have rules about something.
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Almost identical “bee rules,” included in the newly adopted Civil code, have been often quoted in my country as an example of legal silliness as well. But as has been noted above, it’s actually a fairly logical practical solution to problems arising from the civil-law theoretical understanding of “things,” escaped animals and their ownership.
I mean, what other rules for this situation would you have? Bees are a valuable property, some people make their living keeping them and other people in turn rely on the beekeepers to pollinate their crops. So as the lawgiver you can’t really ignore the question. And since there is no telling which individual bee is which once they leave their hive (the article makes fun of little bee leashes, but the obvious impracticality of bee branding is the whole reason for the rule), you force the original owner to pursue immediately (credibly asserting his or her claim) and you preclude him from digging into someone else’s already occupied hive. Et voilá.
This only seems bizarre because, unlike most other esoteric norm concerning specialized activities, it’s included amongst the core rules of civil law - but that’s because the crux of the matter here is ownership, itself one of the most fundamental legal pillars.
Bees? What bees?
This is, what, two lengthy posts and accompanying threads and no one has yet actually given us the text of the Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance? Useless.
I imagine a RPG launcher kept in a case: “In event of Sasquatch, break glass”.
Most civil law countries have the same rules on bees, because they all derived them from Roman law; the Corpus Iuris (aka Justinian’s Digest or Pandects) compiled the rules on bees from the Institutions of Gaius, a beginner’s text which is thought to be around 2100 years old.
For a nerdy lawyer, the rules on bees are a beautiful thing, because they embody the basics of (civil/continental) property & possession in exceptional circumstances.
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That would have been my point as well. Any issue that ends up in dispute often winds up first being relegated to a jurisdiction (federal, state or municipal), and then the ordinance is either codified on the federal level for uniformity or clearly defined as a state or local issue (and thus no longer an issue for the federal courts).
Germans just feel better knowing the laws are written in one book instead of having to trust a lawyer to dig through old cases, argue the case in front of a court, and have the judge decide however he wants because nothing says he needs to respect precedence. All too iffy for most Germans, I suspect.
Or it means that the law is clear-cut enough that disputes are settled without having to go to court.
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