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> repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that w
by jacques_chester 5y ago
> repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder still.
These are called Reform Acts. They are indeed humungous tasks, rarely undertaken. Where I studied law, in the Northern Territory, a Law of Property Act was passed in 2000 and repealed Acts and overruled case law going back to the 12th century in Britain. It was indeed a massive effort.
For some areas of law the Act is also a Code (the Act explicitly says that it is the sole, whole body of the relevant law). This is mostly done for criminal law.
Codes are rare in common law jurisdictions like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. Codes are much more common in civil law countries like France, where the ideal is for all of law to be centralised and rationalised. Both systems require endless tinkering, debate and reinterpretation, which is why I am skeptical of universalist missions to convert the whole of the law into a system of formal symbols.
- ska 5y agoConfusingly Canada has a mix of both civil and common law, at least in Quebec.
- a3camero 5y agoThere are other codes in Canada too, even outside of Quebec, like the Criminal Code of Canada.
- ska 5y agoRight, but that in itself doesn't make it a civil system. If I recall correctly Quebec separates by private and "public" law, so if you get divorced or break up a company it's one system, if you steal from someone, the other. Somehow it's all hybridized and works.
- contravariant 5y agoThe bottleneck is always going to be that legislators need to be able to understand and modify the law. Although arguably stating law in natural language might not help much with that either.
- jacques_chester 5y agoLegislators are not the sole source of law in common law countries. There is also case law. Legislation is typically drafted in a structured way, with deliberate norms and forms. There are professional drafters who do exactly that on behalf of legislators, and a body of case law on the interpretation of legislation that guides their work.