Legal Issues

If one of the main purposes of law is to effectively govern and condition human behavior then the Massachusetts seatbelt law is fundamentally a failed law.  It is a failure because, as the statistics demonstrate, the majority of Massachusetts residents openly acknowledge that they frequently fail to wear a seatbelt in a variety of circumstances.  Perhaps the most surprising statistic relates to the fact that more Rhode Island residents report wearing seatbelts and Rhode Island does not even have a seatbelt law.  One may reasonably wonder, given some of the comments reported from Massachusetts residents regarding a general aversion to and resentment of an alleged nanny state which usurps very personal decisions, whether the Massachusetts seatbelt statistic would be higher had the law never been enacted in the first instance.  For purposes of law considerations this would have significant implications specifically, it would indicate a lack of legitimacy in the seatbelt law and it would also suggest social fissures that might very well represent a lack of respect for the governing body which enacted the bill and a consequent decrease in social unity and cohesion.  Rather than more carefully examining why Massachusetts residents fail to comply with the law, and a variety of different reasons are offered, Massachusetts has instead decided to regulate driving behavior more intimately by proposing a bill which would allow law enforcement to stop, and sanction in the form of fines, drivers in Massachusetts solely on the basis of not wearing a seatbelt.  I would not vote for the bill, although I believe that it is entirely reasonable and a very minor intrusion, primarily because of the way this incremental type of legislative process undermines the purpose of law by initially promising minor types of social control and then continually expanding the scope of the original law until citizens forget how much personal discretion and freedom they have lost.  It would have been much better had Massachusetts originally enacted either a more comprehensive primary seatbelt law or no seatbelt law.  It may be safer for politicians to hedge their bets, and pass incomplete legislation such as the original seatbelt bill, but this type of legislative inadequacy can create a type of anti-social backlash that threatens both the purpose of law and the social control that law seeks to secure.

It is an unfortunate reality that common sense and sociological phenomenon often diverge in ways that are commonly thought to be illogical and counterintuitive such seems to be the case with the Massachusetts bill, and this is why I would vote against even though I would probably vote in favor of a primary seatbelt law if the current secondary law was first revoked and the entire primary law then put to a vote after public discussion and debate that included more interests than politicians, insurance lobbyists trying to minimize accident claims, and car manufactures seeking to minimize tort liability flowing from automobile accidents.  Social control, while a legitimate aim of the law and a valid purpose in many circumstances, can only be accomplished when the underlying law is viewed as representing social values generally and as being narrowly designed to avoid expansive or personally offensive intrusions.  From a sociological view, as applied in legal contexts, social control can be achieved in a variety of ways.  This is clearly illustrated, with respect to the seatbelt law issue, in the statistics compiled and distributed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Residents of states with primary seatbelt laws typically have a 20 higher reported use of seatbelts. This social control is achieved initially through the threat of being pulled over and fined by law enforcement officers.  The fines are not substantial nonetheless, this is an affirmative type of sanction under the color of state or local authority.  It is an intrusion the fact that Americas states approach the seatbelt issue differently suggests that there is no monolithic social value with respect to seatbelts.  Social control, however, is much more subtle than mere sanctions or even public and private recriminations.  There is, for instance, a type of social control that is achieved after the initial passage of a law which functions to regulate social behavior in a sort of subconscious way which supplements and may to some extant supersede the sanctions impact on behavior.  While people might initially be fearful of being fined, and therefore wear a seatbelt, there comes a time when wearing the seatbelt becomes a seemingly natural behavioral reaction to getting in a car rather than a naked fear of being sanctioned.  This is the insidious nature of this Massachusetts bill, this conditioning feature of the social control, that will make governmental law-making appear as an ever-expanding intrusion into personal decision-making.   In my view, this is what some Massachusetts residents are objecting to when they criticize governmental intrusion.  These people do not believe that seatbelts are bad, they do not mock those whom wear their seatbelts regularly, but they do seem to resent the types of laws which are increasingly expansive and increasingly intrusive.

The main problem, in my view, is that the Massachusetts seatbelt law was flawed from the very beginning the legislature should have proposed and debated a primary seatbelt law or they should have withdrawn all seatbelt legislation.  I am in favor of primary seatbelt legislation however, I am not in favor of piecemeal laws which undermine the legitimacy of the law and potentially motivate people to resist social control by being continuously expanded.  The Rhode Island statistics should be a cause for worry.  The residents of Rhode Island have no seatbelt law and they have a higher reported level of seatbelt users than Massachusetts which has such a law.  The purpose of the Massachusetts law, regulating seatbelt behavior, is clearly a failure.  Social control has not been achieved and superimposing sanctions onto a preexisting law will not necessarily enhance social control.  It will likely increase the number of seatbelt wearers, and government revenues, but it may provoke a social order backlash.  This would undermine one of the most important features of a public safety law.