Should laws have built-in expiration dates by default?
intellectualpornography.com
intellectualpornography.com
Now, instead, imagine a boundary on the space the law may take up. If set near (or below!) the current size of the law, this would encourage something lawmakers never, ever currently do for its own sake: refactoring. It would also encourage clarity, strict and manifold definition of terms (to allow later reuse), and many other strange and exciting (though not necessarily ethically sound) ideas.
Almost. But they will be read first, followed by a "reinstate" or "let expire" decision. If it's a bad or unnecessary law, this will cost political capital, which favours the "let expire" option.
Then there'll be committee hearings, where citizens affected by the law will get a say, and since the text is open anyway, motions for amendments can be presented.
And finally, it has to actually pass parliament, making the current parliament answerable for the passage, rather than a past one. It's a lot easier to say "yes, I agree that law is not the best, but I have prioritised other issues over fixing it" than "I voted for it, when I had the option of simply pushing the other button."
> Now, instead, imagine a boundary on the space the law may take up.
That sounds like a good idea. No text longer than 2000 words can be passed by a single vote.
As a downside, though, this might lead to obfuscated and confusing laws as legislators try to fit as many ideas as possible into few words, rather like code with lots of three-way operators.
As we're all subject to all of the laws on the books, even though no one could possibly read or understand all of them, this would be a much more fair solution.
The Icelandic example has, in effect, a similar cap. There can be no more laws than the law-speaker can remember. Capping the size of the body of law would be more like the Icelandic example than sunset provisions. Also you wouldn't have to worry about important laws, e.g. murder, from expiring because no one noticed.
[edit - moved from top-level comment to this thread]
So either the total number of words of The Law goes up or some body of executive-branch regulation grows to have the same effect or (as you pointed out) courts read complicated legal doctrines into terse legislative text or the law is so ambiguous that citizens have no way to predict how a court will rule.
Of all these alternatives I think the first is the least bad.
You do make some good points about limiting the total size of the legal code but NOT limiting the size of the legal code, as we do now, also has some serious drawbacks.
Huh? Where do legislators read laws before voting? (US Congress critters typically don't.)
> If it's a bad or unnecessary law, this will cost political capital, which favours the "let expire" option.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Almost all laws are the threat or imposition of force to some end. We hope that the ends justifies the means, but the means are force, so the bias should be towards no law.
Yes, that includes spending, no matter what its on.
That's why my rule wrt laws is "is this something that I'd throw my mother into jail over?"
Everywhere, including the US. But everybody doesn't read everything.
> You say that like it's a bad thing.
It's bad to the GPs assertion that laws will just be reinstated. I'm arguing in favour of automatic sunsets.
After completing their term in the lower body, the representatives graduate to serve a four year term the higher house. Here, they are entrusted with the power of making new laws.
Elections are staggered (similar to the US sentate), so every year one fourth of the members are elected, one fourth move up, and one fourth retire. This way, the chambers have institutional memory and transitions are smooth.
Both houses have the power to change the legislative topography of the nation. Because newly elected representatives serve in the lower house, when citizens vote to change the direction of the country, the first response to public opinion is the removal of existing laws. Only after serving a term in the lower house can laws be added.
To make this kind of system successful, there might need to be a legal review process that demands small, unbundled laws. Or perhaps a simple word count like @derefr and @mseebach suggest.
I guess the fact that we even think about this stuff pretty much means we're geeks. =)
My (probably incomplete or incorrect) understanding was that they would vet a new law by doing keyword searches concerning the main points of the new law. So if a there was a new law about people's lawns, they'd search for "lawn" and whatever other keywords or synonyms would occur to them.
And it would create havoc in the courts. Recall that the Icelanders settled most of their disputes via blood feuds and something like weregeld. Doing that in the modern age would result in many arguments about retroactive punishment and/or restitution for people convicted under expired laws. you might be found guilty, punished, declared innocent, compensated, and then declared guilty after all and owing the money back.
It is an interesting idea, but I think there'll be a lot of tweaking to be done to the process to get something effective. For example, how long should the expiration date be, 6 years is to short because of the political football problem, 20 years is long if the laws aren't retroactive. Also what to do with the existing laws? Stage out their expiration? How do we choose which one will expire first? or should there be an easy way to strike down old laws?
"No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
http://www.usconstitution.net/glossary.html#EXPOST
"ex post facto adj. Formulated, enacted, or operating retroactively."
This is, however, a limit on Congress.
Of course, if they harm people, those people can still file civil suits.
And, it would be quite surprising if the "whole new kind of evil" managed to harm people without falling into a category already prohibited by law (i.e., assault).
But, the point remains: you can't be charged for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time you broke it.
No, you can't outlaw The Sims retroactively.
Frankly, I didn't completely follow derefr's post .. Did he really suggest that there could be a need for laws to govern what happens to simulated minds?
And by the way, if you're somehow successful in removing my mind from my body and torturing it in a computer, current laws would apply just fine.
Artificial intelligences with distinct personalities are not here yet, but I see no fundamental bounds to their creation and am pretty optimistic about the timeframe. The question of whether such intelligences qualify as people will become a pressing one at that time, even if it seems abstract to you now.
The idea that we need a separate law for every conceivable circumstance in which a kind of crime could be committed seems weird to me. Torturing people is already widely illegal; the kind of people need not be specified in law.
Also, if all laws expire automatically, the working rhythm of the legislative body would change to accommodate this. After all, stuff like passing budgets, which is time sensitive, tend to happen in time.
I'm guessing you don't live in the state of California, where the opposite is true.
For example, if a Welshman crosses the border on a Friday with goods for market, you can kill him.
http://web.mac.com/jdewynne/OldAquarium/MISC/welsh.html
"In Shrewsbury in 1776, seven Welshmen were killed, three by musket, three by sword and one was bludgeoned to death with his own crops. The Borders Act has never been repealed."
Since Massachusetts has same-sex marriage, I suppose that six Boston College students looking to crowd themselves into a three-bedroom house could take a short trip to City Hall and present themselves to landlords as three married couples....
I see what you're getting at, but you are waaaaay late to the party.....the democracy thing has already been figured out.
But, it's always good to hear from citizens. The government likes people to feel they have a voice in the way their country is run!
The big problem I see is that it makes it harder to know what the law says at any given time; that's an inevitable result of more change. Change isn't necessarily bad, but in this case, change for change's sake undoubtedly is.
It's already the case that no one knows "what the law says at any given time".
> Change isn't necessarily bad, but in this case, change for change's sake undoubtedly is.
It's not change for change's sake. It's change to get rid of laws that aren't worth renewing. Since laws are, by definition, threat or imposition of force, they should be somewhat valuable.
I'd argue that simple renewal isn't enough, that renewal should require more effort/votes than the original passage. After all, renewal comes after experience. If a law actually works, it will have more support with experience.
Note that expiration also makes it reasonable to try more experiments because you can reasonably say "hey, if it doesn't work, we're not stuck with it". With "stay until explicit repeal", it's a lot more work to undo mistakes. (Note that almost all laws have benefiaries, and those folks fight tooth and nail against repeal to keep their benefits.)
So nobody knows, for example, the road rules in their local area at any given time? That's my point: it's incumbent on people to know _some_ laws. The more stable these laws are, the easier it is to know what they say. This proposition makes them less stable.
> It's not change for change's sake. It's change to get rid > of laws that aren't worth renewing. Since laws are, by > definition, threat or imposition of force, they should be > somewhat valuable.
So repeal bad laws. That sounds like a better idea than presuming that all laws are bad and repealing them automatically.
Actually, they don't. Almost every vehicle, including those fresh off the lot, will fail an inspection by someone who wants to find a problem.
> The more stable these laws are, the easier it is to know what they say. This proposition makes them less stable.
You're assuming that this change will significantly affect people's ability to know the law. It doesn't - they're already ignorant AND the law mutates enough as it is.
> So repeal bad laws.
It's almost impossible to repeal things. The US still has a mohair subsidy from WWI.
> That sounds like a better idea than presuming that all laws are bad and repealing them automatically.
I'm not presuming that all laws are bad. I'm proposing a mechanism for getting rid of bad and obsolete laws that has some chance of actually working.
We don't elect legislators for life, so why should the default for laws be "forever"?
This is what I don't get; why? I get that laws aren't repealed as often as they should be. My personal suspicion is that it's a lack of political will. I'm not from the US, I don't know that much about the political system. I imagined that repealing a law would be a matter of passing a bill, same as making one. Is this assumption wrong?
That's correct.
> This is what I don't get; why
Why doesn't matter. What matters is whether it's true, because it's silly to act as if things are different, and what you're going to do about it.
> My personal suspicion is that it's a lack of political will.
Laws have beneficiaries. For example, someone is collecting that mohair subsidy. Those folks are quite motivated to keep things the way they are. The folks who would benefit from killing ths subsidy are diffuse - they don't even know that they're paying it.
Plus, legislators get rewarded for doing "new" things, not for fixing old ones that no one remembers.
That's why my "must be renewed every so often" proposal requires more and more effort to pass each time (approaching some limit). The longer that something has been around, the more popular it should be if it's actually worthwhile.
The assumption is correct - the mechanism for repealing a law is just like the mechanism for making a law.