4 ms·
>A law prohibiting murder? Seems like the kind of thing that should have no trouble getting rubber-stamped every few years. Lets invert that though. In 1615
by Sir_Substance 7y ago
>A law prohibiting murder?
Seems like the kind of thing that should have no trouble getting rubber-stamped every few years.
Lets invert that though.
In 1615 Iceland passed a law stating that any Basque that set foot in the Westfjords /must/ be killed. They got around to abolishing it in 2015.
Seems like the sort of thing that probably should have been revoked earlier, no?
More generally, most countries legal codes are a god damn shitshow of strata so dense it takes years to decades of study to understand them even a little.
As a result, rulings are arbitrary and hard to predict, citizens are uninformed on the law and can be blindsided by vindictive police, new laws are disproportionately hard to create due to conflict resolution with old laws being required and parliaments enshrine old laws in tradition and are lothe to amend them.
In general, it's the legal equivalent of that codebase that no one is willing to change because no one remembers why things were implemented in the first place.
Lets not pretend that adding expiry clauses to existing or new laws would lead to a world where murder is legal. That'll get tracked pretty closely and refreshed on the regular. I would expect two outcomes:
1. A government department is created specifically for the purpose of tracking and ranking upcoming law expiries by importance. We should probably have something like this already.
2. For the things society holds really dear, murder/rape/assault, taxes, driving laws etc, I would expect to see a regular "refresh the core issues" session at the start of every year. Essentially a formality where the government can go "yep, torture is still bad, moving on".
However, I'd expect most of the random statutes against oral sex that are still all across the US to expire pretty quickly with lawmakers by and large not giving enough of a shit to refresh them, and that's /good/. Those laws serve no meaningful purpose, their only use is as a weapon for corrupt police to threaten average citizens with.
- kardos 7y agoA yearly review of all of the laws would be labour intensive (read expensive). Governments will simply say "reviewing all the laws means we have to raise taxes to pay for the review, so instead we're going to do a blanket refresh on all laws"
- mLuby 7y agoFair point. A blanket renewal is nearly as pointless as no auto-expiration. There is a solution though: write fewer laws. Ideally so few that citizens can reasonably be expected to know them, or at least so they can be counted. I wonder if a society can function with a max of 1000 laws at any one time?
- Mirioron 7y agoTeach law in school. Require students to understand law, because they are citizens that have to follow those laws. If kids can't do it well, then the laws would need to be changed.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoOne of the problems right now is the sheer size of some laws that get passed a matter of hours after their final draft is released, with no good way that I know of for people to diff the various versions and catch things. Already no one's reading all the laws.
- Sir_Substance 7y agoThat's a separate issue. This isn't even really a matter of law, it should be a matter of simple parliamentary procedure that laws will not be considered unless their draft has been available unedited for three months, unless there is a unanimous vote to have them be considered early.
- Sir_Substance 7y agoI'm envisioning the average sunset clause being more like 20 years. The annual refresh would be "lets make sure this doesn't expire" done voluntarily for the things that are really important that are currently going to expire in 19 years but everyone wants to reset their timer every year just in case. I also don't really think it's that big a deal to ask the government to once a year go "we all still think rape's pretty uncool? yep? great, all in favor of amending the Consolidated Sexual Offenses Act 2019's expiry to be 2038, up from 2037? Done! Moving on." I imagine any politician that objected would get eviscerated in the public eye. Should be a one-hour-a-year process to knock out all the key stuff, particularly if everyone knows first sitting session of the year is the refresh-the-core-values session.