Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent

This is how American laws are usually written. Courts even venture into the debate records to discern intent.

View on HN

The intent bit in the laws is also is very brittle to changes in language. When the underlying words morph and mean different things, then hundreds of years later people kinda forget, and now we have a law that people think has a different intent.

Similar to the way it's brittle when there are money numbers that don't include inflation (either on purpose or not), or (rarely) use a hilariously wrong inflation number instead of an index (say for a law passed during a time of very high inflation). Then the numbers change (or don't), and everything gets weird.

I don't know anything about anything but a good example of what you're talking about has to be "a well regulated militia" or just the second amendment in general. It's wild how different people interpret it

If we didn't have a two-party nightmare willing to filibuster perfectly good policies as a tool to ramrod in alternative agendas, I think it'd work well to have laws with expiration dates. You'd have a natural forcing function by which language would be refined over time, laws would stay relevant, and the total body of legislation would stay at a manageable size.

As something of a litmus test, if a crime is so minor that the police wouldn't do anything if you brought them multiple eyewitnesses, video evidence, and an address to knock on, then having that law on the books probably does more harm than good (many petty crimes like mild speeding would fit those criteria).

I don't think (all) laws should expire. It'd mean that any delay in the legislature could potentially cause a real mess. But I do think a well-functioning legislature should spend a fair amount of time reviewing and perhaps revising the existing body of law.

The budgeting process already works like this and is a hot mess. And so do other things like the PATRIOT Act, the authorization of various agencies like FAA, etc.

With e.g. the PATRIOT Act, the "hot mess" is that they just keep reauthorizing the provisions that require it. But I fail to see how it would be any better if they didn't even have to do that. At least the way things are, every time it comes up for re-auth, it also has to be renegotiated in the court of public opinion.

Yes, laws would be very easy to write if we had consensus. Unfortunately, laws are useful primarily when we don't have consensus.

That may be why the Supreme Court has chosen “history, text, and tradition” for constitutional evaluation. Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a law is frighteningly Orwellian.

> Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a law is frighteningly Orwellian.

reminds me of this: https://themedialine.org/by-region/irelands-push-to-alter-ic...

This is why laws should sunset after some period of time, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. At that time they should be reviewed, debated again, and decisions made as to whether each law should be renewed as-is, revised, or (the default) allowed to lapse.

That's certainly an interesting idea, but i can imagine about 1000 different ways it could go wrong. Any sufficiently disruptive party could easily destroy the government just by preventing all laws from being reinstated. You could also just filibuster past the deadline for renewal to give your buds a couple days to break the law and then let it pass finally. You also would probably need a parallel bureaucracy just to handle the massively increased work load of governing.

Maybe with a new nation that had time to adapt to the scenario it could form a functional system, but if implemented in America today I'd give it a not insignificant chance of actually crashing the entire government like a computer attempting to open a zip bomb

Fair point. I'd like to think nobody would filibuster against popular laws such as those against murder, rape, theft, etc. but more that it's an opportunity for laws like "you can't sell a car on Sunday" or various controlled substance laws to quietly expire as public attitudes change.

Perhaps look at code refactoring as a model. Revising or rewriting code is often avoided because it is expensive and difficult. Applying existing test cases would have to be manual, not automated.

There have been some people pushing for every new law to include a sunset clause, but I don’t know how you could enforce it for new laws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com