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I'm not sure on which law this whole fad is based on. Is it an old law? > [...] The last time the Supreme Court addressed the matter, in 1888, it ruled that “t

• gumby 8y ago
  > A solution to how ridiculous old laws are is automatically expire them. That way, the politicians are forced to reevaulate them. What happens is you have mass renewal laws, which end up being de facto non-expiring laws with a veneer of expiration. My argument sounds like “can’t work 100% so do nothing” but laws that are given sunset clauses because of their controvesiality (e.g. USA Patriot Act) are routinely renewed as their very existence seems to justify their continued existence, while the sunset clause had been added to mollify objectors.
• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > A solution to how ridiculous old laws are is automatically expire them This sort of legal amnesia has major drawbacks. Hand politicians the opportunity to make crisis and they'll take advantage of it. Do we really want debt-limit style brinksmanship around murder statutes? Moreover, cleanly sunsetting laws within our common law system is hard. Case law builds on statute. Regularly wiping away vast portions of case law will have unanticipated consequences.
  • ben_w 8y ago
    Good point. On the other other hand, it would also be pressure to solve another issue with the law — the dilemma that ignorance cannot be an allowable excuse, yet that the law is too complex for even a legal expert to not be ignorant of something.
  • emidln 8y ago
    > This sort of legal amnesia has major drawbacks. Hand politicians the opportunity to make crisis and they'll take advantage of it. Do we really want debt-limit style brinksmanship around murder statutes Yes. Presumably politicians don't want to be murdered by their opposition. It wouldn't lapse more than once.
    • Filligree 8y ago
      Because the first time it did lapse, you'd probably crash society. I'd rather not make the attempt.
      • NotSammyHagar 8y ago
        Think of pro and anti civil rights laws switching in and out of law, divorce, women's rights child labor, workers rights. If these hard fought civil rights expire they wouldn't come back automatically in today's world of ALEC.
  • yellowapple 8y ago
    > Do we really want debt-limit style brinksmanship around murder statutes? Do they? Or do they think they're somehow immune to murder being suddenly legal?
  • Nasrudith 8y ago
    There was one old norse system I recall reading about which worked well for it - they had periodic "readings of the laws" before a broad assembly. If it went forgotten it was autorepealed as irrelevant. If anyone spoke up with a reminder it would be included until the next cycle. Of course with neccessary complexity so high today that wouldn't be that workable - every individual EPA regulation may be important but only come up to specific subsets. The closest thing I could see as viable would involve Cryptography and standard law files as the mode of distribution and a server which accepts uploads of valid laws - which could be defaulted to "one person with another server ensures everything remains in force".
• bilbo0s 8y ago
  >A solution to how ridiculous old laws are is automatically expire them... There are a lot of good reasons that this is a really bad idea. But the fundamental reason is that there are always a few politicians everywhere who can't be trusted to act in good faith.
  • DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    Isn't this the idea of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights? It's a part of the U.S. legal code that can't even be changed by legislatures with sudo access. (Although SCOTUS can apparently update the firmware.)
• brobdingnagians 8y ago
  Rule of law is important. And if you want to get rid of old laws, you should just get rid of them by vote. If the vast majority of old laws are functioning well, then you can keep them functioning, if there are a few ridiculous ones then you can go through normal channels of government. England had a case in the 1800s where everyone forgot that trial by battle still existed from the middle ages. Someone invoked it and it was upheld, but parliament quickly found it within them to repeal the law after that case. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashford_v_Thornton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashford_v_Thornton
  • salawat 8y ago
    The problem with that is that that basically ensures most blue laws stay on the books by way of legislative DoS. As every repeal bill takes up the same legislative slot as adding a new law. An approach with sunset dates ensure the most important laws are at the forefront of national discourse, and ensures that lawmaking doesn't degenerate to "keep trying til you pass it, then smooth sailing because no one ever actively looks at these things anyway." Legislated law is not something to be treated lightly; especially at the Federal level in the United States, where the protection of liberty is a first class objective of the government's existence in the first place. Vote to uphold, I assert, is a clearer demonstrator of the Will of the People rather than vote to repeal. Vote to Repeal allows refuge in obscurity for keeping laws in force that most would not even wish to have in effect just by virtue of the majority of people being ignorant of them. Also, it cuts down on the tendency of law scholasticism to create a privileged class through the exploitation of loopholes, and archaic blue laws. If a law is truly worth having, let it be tested in the fires of reaffirmation. That which is without question, should pass with minimal controversy. That which is in woeful need of update or reformulation, will be brought to the forefront of the national consciousness and reshaped to better serve the interests of the Public. That which is no longer the Will of the People may be safely set aside to fade into the gentle repose of history, and the Public shall enjoy a restored liberty for it's having done so. My two cents.
    • saalweachter 8y ago
      Which do you think is most likely. Each aspect of the law is carefully considered and debated every N years before being reaffirmed or rejected? Or, Every N years the legislature passes a pro-forma "the laws are still the laws" bill, which no one bothers to read or debate or modify in more than a cursory sense?
• arethuza 8y ago
  That reminds me of the "Armed Forces Act" that the UK Government has to pass every 5 years to keep a standing army as these were actually prohibited by the Bill of Rights in 1689: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_Act
• baybal2 8y ago
  > it ruled that “the whole work done by the judges constitutes the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, And on that "the whole work done" is also another prominent anachronism of US flavour of British common law. Other common law countries, let alone mainstream civil law countries do not maintain automatic correctness, authoritativeness and infallibility of institute of justice, from which stems the absence of unqualified immunity of judges in a lot of nations. A scope of legal authority must be very strictly and clearly defined, and based upon constitutional and fundamental legal principles, with easy pathways to invalidate it if done in wrong. In other words, there must be critical criteria of its validity. In US on other hand, in principle and in theory, a judge or juror can issue a ruling completely contravening a law in most the most antithetical, polar way, and nothing will be able to do anything with him, and his ruling will be legally valid.
  • Ericson2314 8y ago
    Yeah let's not blindly worship common law.
  • ddingus 8y ago
    >In US on other hand, in principle and in theory, a judge or juror Is that not what appeals and jury selection processes are for?
• naasking 8y ago
  > A solution to how ridiculous old laws are is automatically expire them. Or to eliminate prosecutorial discretion.
  • gdhbcc 8y ago
    Better yet, do both
• vajrabum 8y ago
  Did you notice that Mozilla plugins broke the other day because somebody forgot to renew a certificate? The law is the framework that our society runs on and business and pretty much ever other activity is a plugin. So do you really want to set us up for breaking the plugins because the cert (law) has expired when the legislature was too busy or forgot to renew? BTW, like any other organization legislatures have limited productivity (bandwidth). It varies from one to another but we aren't living in the days of Hammurabi where you could write it on two stone tablets. Replacing or even renewing the law for a modern technological society is not going to be a semester project for some script kiddies (legislators).
  • klyrs 8y ago
    > Replacing or even renewing the law for a modern technological society is not going to be a semester project for some script kiddies (legislators). If only we had some kind of distributed system that could be used, to maintain a complex codebase with thousands of contributors... oh wait we already have git. Imagine if federal law was a monorepo, and state, county, city laws were branches. It sounds like a nightmare to manage, but lawyers are increasingly tech-savvy and, for example, bitbucket allows one to edit files from a web interface and immediately create pull requests. Additionally, there are already consensus-based and k-of-n cryptosystems that could be used to review and sign pull requests -- this could be the basis of a true technological republic.
    • vajrabum 8y ago
      None of that is going to help with the problem of you have a relatively tiny number of "committers" (legislators).