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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

Philip K. Howard has a new book out: The Rule of Nobody. (Note: I haven't read it, I've just seen a few interviews and considered buying the book.)

The premise is that the fact that laws are constantly added but almost never removed is crippling us. Also, unfair laws are almost always unfair in someone's favor, and the groups benefiting will defend those unfair laws tooth-and-nail, and the morass of laws becomes even more stagnant.

I think Howard is usually seen as conservative, because he's seen as anti-regulation. I tend to think he's anti-stupid-regulation, which is a subtle but important difference. But even if you disagree with Howard in broad strokes, you have to admit that the alcohol laws in this country are pretty good supporting evidence for his premise.

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A longtime wish of mine is that every law ever written came up for review every decade or so, providing ample opportunity to adjust and remove laws to fit changing cultural norms. There is probably a downside to this that I'm not seeing, not being a lawyer and all that.

There are quite a few downsides.

The first problem is that now you have to dedicate a whole lot of work to maintenance. Even if this was done in good faith, you'd have millions spent just reading and rubber stamping laws. Legislatures get little done as it is to add more work.

Then, we have the problem of getting the legislature to take this seriously. What stops gigantic omnibus renewals that, for all intents and purposes, lead to the same thing that we have now?

There's also the risks to partisan fighting over controversial laws. Imagine what happens to an impasse over immigration law, or gun control. The winner, politically, would always be the side that would be more capable of tolerating no law at all. This is far more politically charged than just keeping whatever was the consensus in the past.

So that proposal is only a good idea if you believe that having a harder to govern country is something you want. Rarely a popular opinion among people that make laws.

The legislature that unwittingly passed an honour for the 'Boston Strangler' (used his real name, not that name) lends pretty clear evidence to the idea of legislative rubber-stamping instead of disinterested investigation and fact-checking.

Politicians aren't scientists, and don't operate from root causes and facts; they operate from manipulating social factions and perceptions. If they don't see something as important to their key social factions, it's not worth their attention. Honour this Albert de Salvo guy? Sure, why not? Do it and let's move on to the stuff I want to deal with.

http://www.snopes.com/legal/desalvo.asp

But, if someone were to point out that an unfair law had been renewed, they would need to justify why it was renewed. That'd be slightly better than now, right?

I look at laws as sort of a program code for society - they define a cost function for unwanted behavior (while the economic system defines a reward function for wanted behavior). From that perspective I have to disagree here - I think GP's suggestion is good - laws should be reviewed from time to time just like legacy code should be reviewed for maintainability reasons (even just so that you keep some people familiar with the code). Every decade is probably too much, but every 20-30 years should be doable without too much cost.

The main problem is creating a process where outdated laws can be removed efficiently - which obviously needs to be done in congress. I think there could be a monetary reward involved - not for the congressmen obviously, but for non-members of the congress who initiate a process that leads to a successful removal.

As an engineer, I build a test for every design I put forth. The test validates the design against the intent of the design. You could approach law this way.

In other words, every law has an intent. Make it so before any law can be passed, you must design a test to validate the law against the intent to be run at some point in the future. Then if the test fails outright, or begins to fail over time (some laws work at first, but fail later) then you pull the law out of the books.

I know this is very naive, and over-simplified. But I like the idea.

The thing is, most laws already do this. They are proposed to affect some specific situation which has already occurred (like laws in response to online bullying, etc). The problem isn't that laws are just passed randomly without a specific case in mind: the problem is that they are often broad enough to have unintended consequences on other tangential cases. I don't think the problem is that no tests exist; I think the problem is more like bad test coverage. Laws can have wide reaching implications and it's very difficult to find every applicable situation before they come up.

Sure, they have a situation in mind, but they are not actually tested. At least I've never heard of an instance. (I'm probably wrong)

It would be interesting if a tagging or search system could dig up all old court decisions that would have a different outcome under a proposed new law. Those could form the initial test cases.

Passing a law in the first place takes political momentum, but renewing it is cheap. The Patriot Act keeps getting renewed even a decade after the moment of poor judgment that saw it passed.

a lot of laws actually work like this (see the George Bush tax cuts and Patriot act renewals).

It does allow for fresh debate on things but can also cause a lot of friction and uncertainty.

Based on your description this seems very similar to Mancur Olson's "The Rise and Decline of Nations" - he provides an economic framework to think about special interest groups and why they tend to win out in terms of politics.

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