> If I mistakenly believe the legal scope of self-defense includes using deadly force against threats which are only fuzzily-anticipated in the future, should murdering the roommate a vaguely suspect of harboring ill-intent against me be non-criminal?
There is a big difference between the laws relating to the use of deadly force and accounting laws. Accounting laws are orders of magnitude more complicated and more difficult to understand. So yes, if you come up with some clever accounting trick, and you check with a lawyer, and the lawyer tells you it's OK, then you should not be liable if the lawyer gets it wrong. What else can possibly be reasonably expected of someone?
> There is a big difference between the laws relating to the use of deadly force and accounting laws. Accounting laws are orders of magnitude more complicated and more difficult to understand.
Which is relevant if ignorance of the law is an excuse, but not if it is not.
> So yes, if you come up with some clever accounting trick, and you check with a lawyer, and the lawyer tells you it's OK, then you should not be liable if the lawyer gets it wrong.
The only specific reference to a lawyer looking at it in this story was to the lawyer getting it right (an accounting consultancy got it wrong, previously.) But, in any case, unless it was criminal for the lawyer to get it wrong, this would completely defang accounting law since a lawyer blessing an illegal practice would not be guilty of anything, and anyone who got a lawyers blessing would not be guilty of anything.
Professional malpractice is not a crime but a tort, and the tort requires the client to be harmed by the failure rather than, as in this scenario, owing their liberty to it. So, the criminal law would be completely defanged. And it's unlikely the lawyer would be liable for balance, either.
Yes.
> If I mistakenly believe the legal scope of self-defense includes using deadly force against threats which are only fuzzily-anticipated in the future, should murdering the roommate a vaguely suspect of harboring ill-intent against me be non-criminal?
There is a big difference between the laws relating to the use of deadly force and accounting laws. Accounting laws are orders of magnitude more complicated and more difficult to understand. So yes, if you come up with some clever accounting trick, and you check with a lawyer, and the lawyer tells you it's OK, then you should not be liable if the lawyer gets it wrong. What else can possibly be reasonably expected of someone?