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Comment by Letmesleep69 | Hacker News Reader

> It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand

Why does that not make sense? The law must cover everything from "dont kill certain species" to "don't commit this very specific type of fraud". Society is so advanced we need more laws. Of course Hamurabi's code was short because it didn't need to stop investment bankers committing fraud or voting laws to prevent racial bias or workers rights etc etc. Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read.

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The garbage part is not that there is a large volume of law, but that the law is made even larger implicitly through a system of historical precedent without being explicitly updated to reflect those changes.

As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it.

>As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it.

Another easy example in the opposite direction is how case law has substantially diluted the meaning of words like "infringe", "unreasonable" and "excessive" in amendments 2^1, 2^2 and 2^3.

As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it.

Any support for that statement?

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a layman who, when presented with the commerce clause, replied that he had inferred the Dormant Clause [0] or Civil Rights Act [1] from it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 - "... principally its power to regulate interstate commerce"

I dunno. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Commerce among the states is Congress's domain, so state laws can't unduly interfere.

Its also been interpreted by the courts to mean that you cannot grow crops you consume yourself, because you would have purchased the crops otherwise and are affecting interstate commerce.

Whether or not you agree with that interpretation, it would take some willful ignorance to say that the plain text reading of regulating interstate commerce means you can regulate all commerce because you might have bought something from someone otherwise

Wheat grown by a farmer for his own consumption, not bought or sold, not carried across state lines, can be regulated by Congress as it affects "commerce ...among the several States."

See Wickard v. Filburn.

If you don't want to look it up but still want to understand it, the gist is that by growing your own wheat, you're not buying wheat from farmers, which lowers the price of wheat that may be grown by out-of-state farmers. By growing your own wheat, you're impacting inter-state commerce.

At least that's the logic of the court.

This is the sort of loophole that allows it to apply to everything. By going on a date with person A, you reduce their willingness to spend money on certain products associated with people who don't go on dates, and increase their willingness to spend money on certain products associated with going on dates. Therefore, the federal government can make laws about who you date, and dating becomes considered a commercial venture (so freedom of association wouldn't apply, same reason freedom of association doesn't allow people to bypass minimum wage laws).

This is stretching the law beyond any reasonable interpretation, done so by the same government who gains a lot of power by doing so.

Seems like a poor conclusion.

If a started a business that picks peoples noses among multiple states, would Congress be able to regulate nose-picking by individuals on their own private property?

Laws are not meant to be an exhaustive blacklist. If they were we wouldn't need juries, judges and lawyers. Laws are rules of thumb that make it efficient enough to enforce a society's moral code to the point where it can be done at scale.

There will always be exceptions and details argue over and ultimately you need a critical mass of society to agree to abide by them to a great enough degree.

Expecting any reasonably non-homogeneous society to be able to agree on where to draw lines what constitutes bad behavior in anything other than the obvious cases ( murder, theft, etc) is naive. Expecting laws to cover the vast majority of bad behavior is naive. Expecting to be able to enforce that theoretical set of laws is naive. Expecting to enforce those theoretical laws without creating something akin to 1984 is just insane.

> Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read.

However, the law could still certainly be shortened and simplified. The GDPR is written in plain English.

Yet GDPR is so vague that most companies I talk to about it have each taken very different things from it. "Except as required for security purposes" is a big exception.

It's not as big exception taking into account that the requirements are not about pieces of data that you can get and store, but about particular uses of this data.

If you previously had some private data in your core databases that you used for all kinds of things, finding an exception that allows you to store this data for security purposes doesn't allow you to continue business as usual - it won't permit you to use it for marketing purposes, for example, just as an exception that allows you to require and store some data that's needed to execute the service won't permit you to sell that data to third parties as was common practice earlier - for that you'll need to (try to, likely unsuccessfully) obtain the user's consent.

Traditional legalese has plenty of ambiguities, they're just hidden behind obscure language.

Do you believe that the law is infallible?

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