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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, it may be more common in your country than you think.

Secondly, I cannot agree with "laws that are commonly broken shouldn't be laws" even if we replace laws with municipal bylaws.

People commonly smoke where they shouldn't, don't clean up their dog's poop, park their cars wherever they want, litter and improperly dispose of items and whatever not. So, hey, let's get rid of the rules?

If we are going to clean the system of laws that should not exist, we arguably should prioritize those that are commonly broken, but that can't be the sufficient condition. If we don't prioritize those that are broken, we may waste time repealing weird laws covering situations that hardly occur, so the work will have no practical impact.

Whether a law should be repealed must be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis, not based on considerations like whether people are breaking it like it's going out of style.

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That's a much more nuanced argument, so thanks for writing that out.

I'll counter with this: widespread lawbreaking only occurs when laws are selectively enforced or not enforced at all. For instance, most people jay walk because they don't expect enforcement. No one in my town expects dog waste laws to be enforced. Those who pick up their poop do so because they're decent human beings. If you wanted to stop dog waste, however, you could step up enforcement to discourage law breaking. This would work with many commonly broken laws. Singapore is famous for this approach. Therefore, I still think commonly broken laws should be repealed. If the law is important, then it should be enforced. If it's enforced, then people won't break it.

Another reason that commonly broken laws should be repealed is that having laws on the book that are selectively enforced is dangerous. They give those in power tools to exploit people they don't like. For instance, traffic laws are frequently violated, but they are selectively enforced. Police use selective enforcement of these laws to target black drivers. There are many examples in the entire justice system where selective enforcement of laws has been used as a tool for suppression. Having this legal grey-area where some people can break the law and some can't is ripe for abuse.

Which brings me to my final point regarding countries that have poor safety for women. In corrupt countries, the law exists as a tool to maintain power of a small group of rulers. The mechanism of this control works in a similar, but more extreme, way to how selectively enforced laws can be abused in less corrupt countries. It doesn't make sense to talk about repealing laws in a highly corrupt setting because our fundamental assumptions about what a legal system should do don't hold up (serving and protecting people, maintain social order, etc). Thus, it's not surprising that the most dangerous countries for women also rank extremely high on measures of corruption. In such places, the law basically doesn't matter.

Laws are always selectively enforced. You cannot simply watch every citizen 24 hours a day, and you don't want that kind of society in the first place.

What you don't want is there to be some pattern to the selectiveness. Certainly not due to corruption (the enforcers turning a blind eye to some select individuals), but even if there is no such corruption, the patterns are hard to avoid.

Just because people figure out that they can get away with something doesn't mean it shouldn't be a law. There may be reasons why it shouldn't, entirely unrelated to the popularity of breaking it.

Even if generally enforcing a law seems hopeless, if the law is in place, it can be used in certain situations. Like dog poop. A neighborhood having problems with a particular offender can lean on that law to get something done about them, even if there is no enforcing to help with someone randomly bringing their dog (e.g. by car) from another neighborhood to have a poop.

Where I live, streets have an implicit 3 hour parking rule. Street segments which have no signage about parking, and are available for that purpose, essentially have an implicit, invisible "Parking 3H Max" sign.

Nobody will actively enforce it; you can park your broken down old van in front of someone's front yard and leave it there for months. If nobody calls to complain, likely nothing will happen to that vehicle.

The law exists there for complaints; you can lean on that.

You can also lean on it in situations like this: you shoveled deep snow for an hour and a half in front of your house to dig your car out and create a clean parking spot. When you come back from your errand, your dickhead neighbor, or someone else, has parked there. If they stay for 3 hours, you can have them removed.

That's the concept you're missing; laws do not have to patrolled by active policing that looks for infractions. Enforcement can be complaint-driven. If you repeal a law that is often broken without causing a problem, you take away the basis for someone to have an actionable complaint in those situations when it does cause a problem.

> You can also lean on it in situations like this: you shoveled deep snow for an hour and a half in front of your house to dig your car out and create a clean parking spot. When you come back from your errand, your dickhead neighbor, or someone else, has parked there. If they stay for 3 hours, you can have them removed.

Or when a black family moves into your neighborhood, you can enforce random laws to intimidate them to leave. Sorry, but you don't own a spot just because you shoveled it out. Either people can park there, or they can't.

> Sorry, but you don't own a spot just because you shoveled it out.

That is correct! But the city does own the spot, and it has rules about parking on it. Those rules apply equally against everyone, in principle. But they will never be enforced spontaneously. Someone has to complain, with some valid basis. It exists for these kinds of nuisance situations.

The city is very sympathetic to the concept that some uses of city property (in principle available for use to everyone and anyone) may be annoying to nearby residents.

For instance, some residential streets that are close to transportation amenities or shoppping/business areas have permit-only parking. Only people who can provide proof of residency on a specific street can get a permit to park there; anyone else is in violation, subject to ticketing and towing.

Someone who calls the police on their neighbor for parking more than 3 hours, and then parks in the same spot themselves for more than 3 hours is nothing more than a hypocrite.

The neighbor parked there because he's too lazy to shovel the snow in front of his own house, where an empty, but unusable parking spot is also available, and has no qualms just sailing into the tidily shoveled spot in front of your house, so that you have to shovel in front of his house too when you return.

The city recognizes that situation as a valid complaint and will take action, and that's the end of it. It upholds the concept of parking being associated with adjacent residences, even though it isn't owned by them.

If the city wants to recognize "parking in a free spot in front of someone's house when there is a free spot, covered in snow, in front of the car owner's house" as a legitimate problem then the city should codify it into law and enforce it. Otherwise, it's totally legal for someone in the government, say the police chief, to clear his street of cars right before his holiday party so that his guests have parking. Or for a person to harass neighbors they don't like. Why you want to have a legal system that allows for such abuse is beyond me.

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