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Comment by akvadrako | Hacker News Reader

Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by?

That’s not how laws work. Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.

I think that’d be a wonderful thing if all laws had a natural sunset clause and were forced to be renewed to see if they confirm to the standards of the current society.

Private lewdness was one of the charges. Even the prosecutor said that it was all a bit over the top but he had these laws as tools so he used them.

In some jurisdictions (especially civil law, I think) the DA has no discretion and must follow up on any accusation that could lead to criminal charges. There is no possibility for selective enforcement.

This way the legislative branch has pressure to amend the criminal code as it becomes obsolete---in this case, imagine if people had started accusing others of fornication and private lewdness left and right, and DAs through the state were forced to follow up on those accusations...

> There is no possibility for selective enforcement.

There are huge holes in that. What if, hypothetically, the DA looks at a situation and says 'there is no chance of criminal charges', but some 40-60% of the population thinks there should be?

There is even a fairly topical case of that where a substantial number of Democrat lawmakers are upset with how Barr is handling the Muller report. Imagine squaring a similar case with a law that says prosecution must proceed - I think Barr would be quite happy to claim there is no chance that an Obstruction case would lead to criminal charges.

In the confrontational Western-style justice system the prosecutor always has discretion. Not to acknowledge that just muddies the water in difficult cases. It is much safer to accept that selective enforcement happens, that sometimes the justice system fails to deliver justice and that there need to be release valves in how people are appointed so the abuses don't get out of hand.

Note that this wide prosecutorial description is not universal among western countries (maybe it is a common law thing?)

Germany has compulsory prosecution (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_prosecution, the German article Google Translated has mich more detail) and it’s subject to review by the courts (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klageerzwingungsverfahren and https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermittlungserzwingungsverfah...)

Note that as a result of this plea bargaining are a rare thing.

> Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.

Any law that’s important gets used and enforced regularly. The incentives of the modern bureaucratic state mean that any law that is used regularly will eventually be superseded by a more specific law that covers the circumstances more specifically; that’s why there are laws for mail fraud, computer fraud,, wire fraud etc. instead of just prosecuting people for fraud.

Any prosecution that relies on using a law that hasn’t been enforced in multiple decades is an obvious instance of prosecutorial discretion, i.e. injustice.

It’s like how the FBI works; they may not be able to prove you did what they started investigating you for but if they catch you lying about anything you can be prosecuted for it and it’s really easy to catch someone in a lie if interviews aren’t recorded but reconstructed from the agent’s notes after the fact.

Law enforcement can either follow rules and principles or it can be “We’re going to get these bastards.” The latter is corrupt. Laws long unenforced should lapse unless explicitly renewed.

> Any law that’s important gets used and enforced regularly

The third amendment is an important law, but active enforcement is...rare. Even in criminal law, arguably, the ideal is that the existence of the law itself acts as a deterrent—an infrequently enforced law isn't necessarily unimportant, it may just be successful.

You can at least in principle distinguish between "no cases because it is never violated" and "no cases because it is routinely violated but never enforced."

The third amendment forbids the US government from doing something it has no desire to do. Professional armies just aren’t quartered in civilian homes anymore. If they did want to do it they’d find some legal justification to do so. Wickard v. Filburn[1] shows that being contrary to a plain reading of the law is no real obstacle to the government trampling roughshod over the US constitution.

Active enforcement of important laws may occasionally be rare but if you can’t pass legislation to keep the constitution of your state in effect you probably have an incipient civil war on your hands, or incompetence at a level that makes the Brexit Tories look like Bismarck.

The overwhelming majority of important laws are enforced regularly. People don’t have to hunt for laws to get thieves, murderers or slavers[2], they’re enforced multiple times per year. Theft and murder have been illegal as long as there have been states, and slavery has been illegal in the US since, what, 1864?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery_in_the_Un...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude

Laws that have been unenforced for a long time, like the 100 years cited here, can absolutely be struck down and ignored by the court. The word for it is desuetude [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude

After a few decades of no enforcement? I think that would be reasonable.

I think we have enough laws. I think at this point, we should have a "one in, one out" rule: government can't make a new law without repealing an existing one.

Laws should have a given lifespawn, and be re-evaluted at the end of that lifespan for relevancy and effectiveness given the current culture. Too many laws remove freedom and power from the average citizen, and are actually dangerous if left un-audited. We have so many laws, you can't know them to follow them, thus making people criminals without knowledge of wrongdoing.

This process itself might be as dangerous as the one it replaces, though. I suspect things like civil rights, social security, Medicare, etc. would be difficult to renew in today's political climate despite public support for them.

Look how hard it is to do stuff like raise the debt ceiling, which wasn't a partisan football until just a few years ago.

Good point! I can definitely see how expiring laws could be hugely manipulated. But still, I currently take issue with the number of laws currently in place, that I'm subject to, that I don't know exist. I think a smaller body of laws would be more manageable for law makers, easier to enforce, leave fewer gray areas to be manipulated in court rooms, etc... Look up the number of convictions for possession of a "gravity knife" in New York city. If you've been to New York, and possessed a pocket knife, you are likely guilty. It was recently amended after some 50 years of targetted abuse; how many other laws exist that obviously encroach on our individual freedoms?

Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by?

Most of them should be ignored from the day they're enacted.

Dumb ones, yeah.

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