Why should that apply only to people vs corporations? How about people vs government? Should I be expected to read all the laws, and if not a reasonable expectations, laws are invalid?
Somebody is sure as hell trying and I'm honestly impressed by the commitment and content produced from their effort, behold: @crimeaday https://twitter.com/crimeaday
(I do agree it would be great for our laws to be more readable, but I don’t see how society could function with as low a limit on legislation as you’re suggesting.)
Eliminate all victimless crimes in their entirety. If no third party is harmed or unreasonably endangered, there shouldn't be any reason to fine or incarcerate someone. This basically eliminates all 'possession of' crimes that are so often misused by police to inflict all kinds of harm. (Good example being getting arrested for some marijuana in the car leading to car impound and ludicrous fees to get it released.)
Jury Nullification is one such example. Threats of life in prison (even if innocent) unless you plea down to a lesser charge is another.
That said, these laws are complex. [0]This is a felony scoresheet from Florida that shows how things get tallied up. Looking closely you can see the extreme impact of plea deals in sentencing, and the way multiple charges get added together.
Congress is not even required to read the bills they vote on
Only sharing because the Church has done extensive writing on legal theory and because the Church is transnational -- it's beyond the jurisdiction of any country and predates every country currently on earth.
None of us know which of our actions constitute a crime. Even worse, in many cases neither does anyone until someone goes to a court and a precedent is set. This is a terrible system.
Also, the concept conflicts with the idea of local government and basically requires a large central world government. I feel like thr idea of simplified laws is mostly an impractical pipe dream propagated by people who don't like that they can't dump poison into local rivers or sell people scams that harm them.
Here is how we can get a proper measure of the problem: how often are people harmed by complex contracts they signed but didn't understand, vs how often are people harmed by laws they didn't know existed? And how often were those people doing something meaningfully harmful to someone else and should have known better on basic moral grounds?