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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.

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> I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.

I could really get behind this sort of rate-limiting. It would also make the thinktank-written legislation a little less appealing for the lawmakers, as they'd still need to write everything out.

That limits the rate of change of the law, not its total size.

In medieval Iceland, the lawspeaker -- the leader of the parliament -- had to recite the law from memory every three years (one third in each year).

> Arguably

I'd like to see you support that argument.

Implicitly, the argument is that, when "cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law," justice for litigants declined when sheer access to the necessary legal funds and time began to outweigh other costs and benefits as a factor in determining pursuit of justice. Maybe it's not self-evident, but I don't think direct quantifiable evidence of justice is necessarily available, so what qualitative evidence would be capable of confirming support?

My counterargument would be that before the typewriter literacy rates were much worse than they are now. So while it's true that laws were simpler, interpreting those laws was still out of reach for many at the bottom of the economic ladder. It would be interesting to try to compare legal complexity with the percentage of society that has a sufficient reading comprehension to meaningfully interact with those laws across various eras.

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