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I've thought for a long time that we should have a cap on the size of the body of law - say, 250,000 words. This would accomplish sunset indirectly. If someone

I've thought for a long time that we should have a cap on the size of the body of law - say, 250,000 words. This would accomplish sunset indirectly. If someone wants to pass a new law and the body of law is already at the limit they'd have to push for something to be repealed first. As a downside, though, this might lead to obfuscated and confusing laws as legislators try to fit as many ideas as possible into few words, rather like code with lots of three-way operators. As we're all subject to all of the laws on the books, even though no one could possibly read or understand all of them, this would be a much more fair solution. The Icelandic example has, in effect, a similar cap. There can be no more laws than the law-speaker can remember. Capping the size of the body of law would be more like the Icelandic example than sunset provisions. Also you wouldn't have to worry about important laws, e.g. murder, from expiring because no one noticed. [edit - moved from top-level comment to this thread]

sethg 17y ago
I don’t see how this could work. In a society with a developing technology and economy, new situations come up (e.g., how to allocate spectrum for these cool new cellular telephone thingies) where one could reasonably argue that new government regulations are called for, and old laws are unlikely to become obsolete at the same rate. So either the total number of words of The Law goes up or some body of executive-branch regulation grows to have the same effect or (as you pointed out) courts read complicated legal doctrines into terse legislative text or the law is so ambiguous that citizens have no way to predict how a court will rule. Of all these alternatives I think the first is the least bad.
- ratsbane 17y ago
  I'm not sure how it would work either or if it would. As new technology develops old technologies also become obsolete - thus as we have more laws dealing with biotech and airplanes, we can get rid of laws dealing with leprosy and stagecoaches. More importantly this might force legislators to write their code more efficiently and address the intent of the participants. You do make some good points about limiting the total size of the legal code but NOT limiting the size of the legal code, as we do now, also has some serious drawbacks.

sethg 17y ago

I don’t see how this could work. In a society with a developing technology and economy, new situations come up (e.g., how to allocate spectrum for these cool new cellular telephone thingies) where one could reasonably argue that new government regulations are called for, and old laws are unlikely to become obsolete at the same rate. So either the total number of words of The Law goes up or some body of executive-branch regulation grows to have the same effect or (as you pointed out) courts read complicated legal doctrines into terse legislative text or the law is so ambiguous that citizens have no way to predict how a court will rule. Of all these alternatives I think the first is the least bad.

ratsbane 17y ago
I'm not sure how it would work either or if it would. As new technology develops old technologies also become obsolete - thus as we have more laws dealing with biotech and airplanes, we can get rid of laws dealing with leprosy and stagecoaches. More importantly this might force legislators to write their code more efficiently and address the intent of the participants. You do make some good points about limiting the total size of the legal code but NOT limiting the size of the legal code, as we do now, also has some serious drawbacks.