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> The amount of work it would take to create a legal code which is internally consistent and always yields an agreeable outcome is not feasible. Is there somet

• AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  The existing law isn't the underlying source of the complexity. It's that people want the complexity. They want killing to be against the law, but not if it was self defense, or you were under duress, or you couldn't reasonably know that your actions would kill someone etc. You can easily pass a law that says all killing is illegal, but that isn't good enough. You either have to consider every possible thing that could happen in the universe and encode what should happen in each case into the law, which is clearly infeasible, or there will be things that can happen which you haven't considered ahead of time, and then you still have to specify something. If what you specify is that unanticipated acts are illegal then everyone will be in prison. But if they aren't then it will be easy to find a provable loophole to murder. Neither of those is acceptable. That's why we have judges. To address that. But that answer is still terrible because then you don't know what the law is until you're already in court. It's just less terrible than either putting everyone in prison or letting anyone get away with murder. Which means the goal is to minimize the number of situations where that needs to happen, without causing the well-specified outcomes to be unrighteous.