Alternate title: The Philosophy of Jaywalking

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a bunch of funny TikTok videos featuring California lawyer Michael J. Mandell a/k/a “Law by Mike“, including the one below on jaywalking, i.e. crossing a street outside a designated crosswalk.

For my part, I was thinking of writing up a formal academic paper on this topic (tentatively titled “The Philosophy of Jaywalking”) in which I use ChatGPT to imagine what the great thinkers of Western civilization — everyone from Aristotle and Aquinas to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein — would have to say about the law and ethics of jaywalking. Alas, a sizable scholarly literature already exists on this subject: input “jaywalking” into Google Scholar, for example, and you will get 12,300 results!

Between these two extremes — dense scholarly articles with footnotes on the one side and fun 30-second TikTok music videos on the other — you will find this moralistic critique of jaywalking laws by Daniel Herriges titled “‘Jaywalking’ Shouldn’t Even Be a Thing” (2020) as well as this maddening ProPublica report by Topher Sanders & Benjamin Conarck titled “Florida Police Issue Hundreds of Bad Pedestrian Tickets Every Year Because They Don’t Seem to Know the Law” (2017). The question these authors should be asking, however, is not whether jaywalking is ethical or should be illegal; the better question instead is: What is the optimal level of jaywalking?