Hacker News Reader

Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

Laws need to be managed like software: There should be a process for testing, user feedback, quick patches for bugs or conflicts, and regular updates to fix issues. If you think about it, both laws and software are called "code".

The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.

Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.

View on HN

Software development is slower in larger, more political organisations (hello Change Advisory Boards) and larger/older/sprawling codebases.

Most governments are huge, highly political, slow moving organisations. It seems to just come with the territory: slower rollout of changes, longer periods to observe the changes in the wild (throw in a few years to see how the law plays in legal cases/challenges), and suddenly you have fewer iterations to get it right.

> The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method.

It's not? It has been "agile" for centuries. It is constantly patched as someone wants to address some issue. It's rather rare for a completely new law to be written.

> Lawmakers try to plan for everything

It's not? They see one bug, e.g. children being exploited, now they tried it with a patch that is horribly broken and doesn't really work, so they patched it again, to remediate one issue, while they try to figure out more patches.

California is a common law jurisdiction. Judges evaluate cases and make rulings based on the intent of the law instead of the literal text as written in order to avoid absurdities, setting precedent for future similar cases. If the lawmakers disagree with case law, they amend the law.

Engineers and scientists would like to imagine our society operates off a specification. But laws are only justifications for what people in power want to do. All of what you’re talking about reinforces the myth that the text matters and is precisely defined.

It's also hilarious how poorly defined so many laws are. So many loopholes and bugs everywhere. Probably because most lawyers/politicians are effectively illiterate when it comes to logic.

> Probably because most lawyers/politicians are effectively illiterate when it comes to logic.

Unfortunately the “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" is completely wrong in politics. In politics and lawmaking, always attribute to malice, not stupidity.

Lawmakers appears extremely dumb on TV for the most part, but the teams behind them are actually very smart (pure evil, but smart). All the loopholes and bugs in laws are, to them, a feature. It allows them to always prosecute regular citizens, but the favored people (politicians, campaign contributors, oligarchs) always have a free pass. This is by design.

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's important to remember that ambiguous laws are also a feature of modern societies. Laws have to be ambiguous, for one because the real world cannot be codified into abstract laws perfectly, and because separation of power is a fundamental part of how our society works. Judges are supposed to apply the law to specific cases. Thus lawmakers get to decide the wording but judges get to decide how to use it. If there was no room for ambiguity, we would not need any judges.

That's how it should work on paper anyway...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com