5 ms·

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and f

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time, but won't necessarily be that way to future generations. Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the future you'd like to be able to edit the source code and recompile it, not blindly patch the binaries.

smugma 3y ago
That’s more aligned with countries that follow civil law work. They define the law and what it covers. In contrast, common law is more open to interpretation, changes over time, etc. Yes, this is super generalized, but the dichotomy explains two very different approaches to how countries approach their writing and interpreting of laws.
- logicchains 3y ago
  This is one of the reason common law countries are generally wealthier than civil law ones, because precedent is stronger in common law, so it's easier to do business (less uncertainty).
  - bernawil 3y ago
    Sounds like a just-so explanation and something something causation ≠ correlation. Like me saying "Countries that use imperial units are richer than countries that use metric. The inconsistency in the former make their citizens more adaptable from childhood and supercharge their productivity."
derefr 3y ago
Okay, so what do you do with laws that already exist at the time your country is founded, which 100% of the public wants to keep, but has no justification for?
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Surely if 100% of the public wants something they can articulate _some_ justification?
  - derefr 3y ago
    Inevitably: "we've always done it exactly this way until now, and it's worked, and we'd rather just keep doing it exactly this way, without having to re-think it from scratch." Where "this way" includes all sorts of implementation details that may or may not be important. Think of a baker in some kind of baker's guild, who was taught as an apprentice various techniques for how to get the best rise from their bread, before any scientific understanding of what those techniques are doing. The baker wants to keep following their various rules of thumb, because they know they'll produce the best bread. They don't know why the rules-of-thumb work; they just know that whenever they've accidentally diverged from them, they get less puffy bread. Now, replace "baker's rules for baking bread" with e.g. "common-law rules around easements and rights-of-way in property disputes."
- int_19h 3y ago
  You pass a law saying that such and such existing laws remain in force temporarily and set up a commission to study them in detail, figure out what's actually important, and author new model laws as needed for the legislature to consider. This can be dialed from piecemeal replacement to a wholesale rewrite. Something along these lines is how most modern states handled it in practice, if you look at e.g. former Warsaw Pact states.
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. I agree, and it mostly is. I'm pretty sure it is always recorded when a congressman speaks about a bill, plus they always show dissenting opinions of the SCOTUS. However, one major problem is that language changes with time. Words go out of favor, and change meaning. Sometimes they change their meaning to be the exact opposite. Sometimes there are contenpary dictionaries with conflicting definitions. I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over the generations.
- ciabattabread 3y ago
  > I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over the generations. Until “thou shalt not kill” gets held hostage by a senator who wants a subsidy for a coal mine. Exempt those kinds of laws - murder, theft, false witness? Congrats, you have a de-facto theocracy.
  - I_am_uncreative 3y ago
    Isn't that kind of the point of the Common Law though? Murder is often not defined in statute and simply has a Common Law definition.
nradov 3y ago
US courts sometimes look to records of debates in the legislature when deciding how to interpret a particular law.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Quite often, we can't even get lawmakers to include the concept of inflation into the laws, so any fine or penalty with a set amount ends up being decayed into nothing over time.
rcarr 3y ago
To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it seems to me like someone is taking the function of the contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the body that alters what's returned. Having something like this would be akin to having the original ticket specification to look at which is obviously handy when the inevitable disagreements arise between users, developers and stake holders. It may also prevent the law from getting needlessly complex with endless if statements.
- staunton 3y ago
  > To me, the law and programming seem very similar If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who interpret the law based on precedent and common sense. A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden ad long as they don't really cause too much harm, which means laws are written keeping in mind that the system has and needs slack.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    > If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Er no. The law existed long before computers did. > Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all. Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company knows that the feature requests never stop piling in either because the computer program will never be able to handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw code decide what the return value is. > A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden as a way to introduce slack into the system. No, because you're assuming here that the law directly controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be no crime because once a law was written, everyone would abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of the law is for evaluating the actions of people after they have done something. People are run time variables that are inserted into the law function, they are not the code themselves.
lrem 3y ago
I believe that Sweden publishes laws as both the letter and separately the spirit. The former providing the rules, the latter what thought process led to making them that way. It might have been Norway though. One of these two.

smugma 3y ago

That’s more aligned with countries that follow civil law work. They define the law and what it covers. In contrast, common law is more open to interpretation, changes over time, etc. Yes, this is super generalized, but the dichotomy explains two very different approaches to how countries approach their writing and interpreting of laws.

logicchains 3y ago
This is one of the reason common law countries are generally wealthier than civil law ones, because precedent is stronger in common law, so it's easier to do business (less uncertainty).
- bernawil 3y ago
  Sounds like a just-so explanation and something something causation ≠ correlation. Like me saying "Countries that use imperial units are richer than countries that use metric. The inconsistency in the former make their citizens more adaptable from childhood and supercharge their productivity."

derefr 3y ago

Okay, so what do you do with laws that already exist at the time your country is founded, which 100% of the public wants to keep, but has no justification for?

semiquaver 3y ago
Surely if 100% of the public wants something they can articulate _some_ justification?
- derefr 3y ago
  Inevitably: "we've always done it exactly this way until now, and it's worked, and we'd rather just keep doing it exactly this way, without having to re-think it from scratch." Where "this way" includes all sorts of implementation details that may or may not be important. Think of a baker in some kind of baker's guild, who was taught as an apprentice various techniques for how to get the best rise from their bread, before any scientific understanding of what those techniques are doing. The baker wants to keep following their various rules of thumb, because they know they'll produce the best bread. They don't know why the rules-of-thumb work; they just know that whenever they've accidentally diverged from them, they get less puffy bread. Now, replace "baker's rules for baking bread" with e.g. "common-law rules around easements and rights-of-way in property disputes."
int_19h 3y ago
You pass a law saying that such and such existing laws remain in force temporarily and set up a commission to study them in detail, figure out what's actually important, and author new model laws as needed for the legislature to consider. This can be dialed from piecemeal replacement to a wholesale rewrite. Something along these lines is how most modern states handled it in practice, if you look at e.g. former Warsaw Pact states.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. I agree, and it mostly is. I'm pretty sure it is always recorded when a congressman speaks about a bill, plus they always show dissenting opinions of the SCOTUS. However, one major problem is that language changes with time. Words go out of favor, and change meaning. Sometimes they change their meaning to be the exact opposite. Sometimes there are contenpary dictionaries with conflicting definitions. I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over the generations.

ciabattabread 3y ago
> I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over the generations. Until “thou shalt not kill” gets held hostage by a senator who wants a subsidy for a coal mine. Exempt those kinds of laws - murder, theft, false witness? Congrats, you have a de-facto theocracy.
- I_am_uncreative 3y ago
  Isn't that kind of the point of the Common Law though? Murder is often not defined in statute and simply has a Common Law definition.

nradov 3y ago

US courts sometimes look to records of debates in the legislature when deciding how to interpret a particular law.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

Quite often, we can't even get lawmakers to include the concept of inflation into the laws, so any fine or penalty with a set amount ends up being decayed into nothing over time.

rcarr 3y ago

To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it seems to me like someone is taking the function of the contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the body that alters what's returned. Having something like this would be akin to having the original ticket specification to look at which is obviously handy when the inevitable disagreements arise between users, developers and stake holders. It may also prevent the law from getting needlessly complex with endless if statements.

staunton 3y ago
> To me, the law and programming seem very similar If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who interpret the law based on precedent and common sense. A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden ad long as they don't really cause too much harm, which means laws are written keeping in mind that the system has and needs slack.
- rcarr 3y ago
  > If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Er no. The law existed long before computers did. > Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all. Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company knows that the feature requests never stop piling in either because the computer program will never be able to handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw code decide what the return value is. > A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden as a way to introduce slack into the system. No, because you're assuming here that the law directly controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be no crime because once a law was written, everyone would abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of the law is for evaluating the actions of people after they have done something. People are run time variables that are inserted into the law function, they are not the code themselves.

lrem 3y ago

I believe that Sweden publishes laws as both the letter and separately the spirit. The former providing the rules, the latter what thought process led to making them that way. It might have been Norway though. One of these two.