6 ms·

There are times I think the number of laws should be fixed... at say 1000. If congress wants to make a new law, they have to remove an old one.

tc 17y ago
That's a good idea, though the constant should be lower. Human societies survived for thousands of years with on the order of 10 (very popular) to a few dozen criminal statutes.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  Well, we do have a lot more to make laws about now. Internet privacy law was clearly not a concern for cavemen. If you make the law too general, you'll have the same problem.
  - tc 17y ago
    There's a legal scholar (and I'm blanking on the source at the moment) that makes a very convincing point that a small handful of laws (against violence, fraud [1], etc.) covers 95-98% of all cases. The other 2-5% of cases are necessarily judgement calls. What's interesting is that the percentage of cases requiring judgement calls doesn't decrease as you go from N laws to 10,000N laws. [1] To your point: it's true that we have more things we can make laws about, but I suspect that it isn't true that we should make laws about every specific thing. Fraud is fraud, murder is murder. It shouldn't matter whether you use the internet, a telephone, or pencil and paper to defraud someone, in the same way that we don't need a separate murder statute for each choice of murder weapon.
    - iron_ball 17y ago
      And the exact application of those few laws in nearly infinite situations would require first a caste of extremely powerful judges, and later an accumulation of precedents which would effectively become a massive and complex legal code in itself.
      - tc 17y ago
        Some brilliant thinkers centuries ago developed an ingenious technology for constraining judges: juries. Of course, juries work better when they are able to find on both the facts and the justice of the law. We've deviated from this at our peril. Mens rea, criminal intent, has historically been the simplifying agent in law. That's why you don't see a terribly complicated set of case laws surrounding, say, murder. The problem with lots of current criminal statutes is that you can be guilty of violating them without any intent to harm.
        tptacek 17y ago
        You've disregarded the second, stronger portion of that argument. Constrained though they may be, the trail of precedents judges would generate in the "1000 laws" scenario would simply constitute a complex shadow law.
        tc 17y ago
        I believe I addressed that with the note about criminal intent. Common law has tended to focus obsessively on mens rea. Statute law has tended to disregard it. The difference probably has something to do with having to make a judgement about a particular case with the humans that are going to be affected standing there in front of you, as compared to dreaming up a bunch of laws in the abstract, or coming up with laws to address a politically attractive but wildly uncommon situation. I believe this argument is empirically strong. You can see for yourself that there are (at least) hundreds of years of case law about murder. And yet the law surrounding murder seems quite a bit more straightforward than the laws surrounding, say, exporting electronics. This is because criminal case law has been sharpened by a focus on criminal intent.
        tptacek 17y ago
        As recently as this year, SCOTUS has made rulings that set new legal precedent for murder (Google "Tonya Harden"). I don't even have to argue that it's specious to compare murder to environmental destruction or occupational safety to rebut that argument.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 17y ago
  Less than 75 years ago, it was legal for parents to send their 10-year-old children to work in mills. But your point is taken; even with oppressive child labor, civilization managed to survive.
  - tc 17y ago
    What people forget is that child labor on farms was just as oppressive and dangerous. Just like we see in the third world today, children work in factories because it is their best option (as compared to starvation or farm labor) rather than because of inadequate laws. Technology, a capital infrastructure, and pervasive wealth solves this problem, not politicians.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      False dichotomy. The FLSA allowed children to work on farms with their parents. That too should have been illegal, and correcting it complicates the law. Once again we see free markets failing to cope with externalities and twisted incentives. Children don't want to work on farms, nor are they qualified to make such judgements, nor are their parents, in exactly the same way that parents can't consent to numerous other things for their children (for instance, a parent can't consent to marry off an 11 year old daughter). Whether you're poor or not, having your children pad your income isn't a viable solution, nor is it efficient, and yet it is the short-term solution the free market demonstrably arrived at.
      - tc 17y ago
        I take a false dichotomy charge seriously. I think you misunderstand me. I'm certainly not defending the FLSA's farm exemption, which was clearly just a bow to a powerful special interest group [1]. Of course children don't want to work on farms or in factories. Does anyone want to work in a factory? My point is simply that if you go to some random third-world country where children are working in factories, and you do nothing else than prevent them from working in factories, you very likely have not increased their quality of life. To your horror, you will see an increase in children scrounging for food in dumpsters. You will see them selling wares on the street. And you will see fewer families escaping a brutal life of farm labor to seek a better life in cities. Your point about free markets also misses the mark. You could repeal all the child labor laws today in the US, and you would not find (a statistically significant number of) factories hiring children for the simple reason that with modern industrial techniques children wouldn't even be productive enough to justify their space on a factory floor. This is part of the reason why teenage unemployment is so high even though teens will work for minimum wage. [1] Not to say that I think much harm comes from this today.
- dfranke 17y ago
  You can get away with one, really -- protection of private property, with one's own body defined as a property. However, it's probably easier to codify without an accompanying philosophical treatise if you write it as three to four laws, banning violence, theft, fraud, and possibly defamation.
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    Defamation is a combination of fraud and violence. The problem with your scheme is the protection of the commons.
    - derefr 17y ago
      It might not work today, but if one day we create strong AI, we can create (a disinterested) one called "the Environment", and give it the property rights to everything not currently considered private.
- alain94040 17y ago
  You do realize, of course, that your goal of having only 10 laws would fall in the exact pitfall described by the original poster, which is how vague laws can be. Once a law is broad and vague, it is subject to interpretation and may become subjective. Which is the original point of this article. Sorry, no solution found yet :-)
tptacek 17y ago
The law can be fair or the law can be simple.
- stratomorph 17y ago
  Unfortunately, it can also be neither. It's easier to simplify than make it fair.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Your first point is well taken. Your second point isn't. A lot of things aren't easy, and we do them anyways because they're right.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  It is easier to abide by simple, though unfair, law than complicated and arguably fair law.
- jbellis 17y ago
  That's a good sound bite, but I don't agree that a simple law must inherently be unfair. In particular, I think that a simple law is likely to achieve greater fairness in a specific area than a complex one, even if neither is perfectly fair for whatever definition of fair.
pyre 17y ago
I guess you should also define 'laws.' Some 'laws' do things like levy taxes or tariffs. Because they are 'laws' they make it a crime to avoid then, but by themselves they are not something that seeks to make criminals.
Devilboy 17y ago
Congress will be OK with this I think, they'll just make each law span 1000s of pages.
jbellis 17y ago
Alternatively, Milton Friedman suggested that all laws should have an expiration date.
- Adam503 17y ago
  I'd rather see the endless mountains of right wing nonsense Milton Friedman wrote had that expiration date

tc 17y ago

That's a good idea, though the constant should be lower. Human societies survived for thousands of years with on the order of 10 (very popular) to a few dozen criminal statutes.

DanielStraight 17y ago
Well, we do have a lot more to make laws about now. Internet privacy law was clearly not a concern for cavemen. If you make the law too general, you'll have the same problem.
- tc 17y ago
  There's a legal scholar (and I'm blanking on the source at the moment) that makes a very convincing point that a small handful of laws (against violence, fraud [1], etc.) covers 95-98% of all cases. The other 2-5% of cases are necessarily judgement calls. What's interesting is that the percentage of cases requiring judgement calls doesn't decrease as you go from N laws to 10,000N laws. [1] To your point: it's true that we have more things we can make laws about, but I suspect that it isn't true that we should make laws about every specific thing. Fraud is fraud, murder is murder. It shouldn't matter whether you use the internet, a telephone, or pencil and paper to defraud someone, in the same way that we don't need a separate murder statute for each choice of murder weapon.
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    And the exact application of those few laws in nearly infinite situations would require first a caste of extremely powerful judges, and later an accumulation of precedents which would effectively become a massive and complex legal code in itself.
    - tc 17y ago
      Some brilliant thinkers centuries ago developed an ingenious technology for constraining judges: juries. Of course, juries work better when they are able to find on both the facts and the justice of the law. We've deviated from this at our peril. Mens rea, criminal intent, has historically been the simplifying agent in law. That's why you don't see a terribly complicated set of case laws surrounding, say, murder. The problem with lots of current criminal statutes is that you can be guilty of violating them without any intent to harm.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        You've disregarded the second, stronger portion of that argument. Constrained though they may be, the trail of precedents judges would generate in the "1000 laws" scenario would simply constitute a complex shadow law.
        tc 17y ago
        I believe I addressed that with the note about criminal intent. Common law has tended to focus obsessively on mens rea. Statute law has tended to disregard it. The difference probably has something to do with having to make a judgement about a particular case with the humans that are going to be affected standing there in front of you, as compared to dreaming up a bunch of laws in the abstract, or coming up with laws to address a politically attractive but wildly uncommon situation. I believe this argument is empirically strong. You can see for yourself that there are (at least) hundreds of years of case law about murder. And yet the law surrounding murder seems quite a bit more straightforward than the laws surrounding, say, exporting electronics. This is because criminal case law has been sharpened by a focus on criminal intent.
        tptacek 17y ago
        As recently as this year, SCOTUS has made rulings that set new legal precedent for murder (Google "Tonya Harden"). I don't even have to argue that it's specious to compare murder to environmental destruction or occupational safety to rebut that argument.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
tptacek 17y ago
Less than 75 years ago, it was legal for parents to send their 10-year-old children to work in mills. But your point is taken; even with oppressive child labor, civilization managed to survive.
- tc 17y ago
  What people forget is that child labor on farms was just as oppressive and dangerous. Just like we see in the third world today, children work in factories because it is their best option (as compared to starvation or farm labor) rather than because of inadequate laws. Technology, a capital infrastructure, and pervasive wealth solves this problem, not politicians.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    False dichotomy. The FLSA allowed children to work on farms with their parents. That too should have been illegal, and correcting it complicates the law. Once again we see free markets failing to cope with externalities and twisted incentives. Children don't want to work on farms, nor are they qualified to make such judgements, nor are their parents, in exactly the same way that parents can't consent to numerous other things for their children (for instance, a parent can't consent to marry off an 11 year old daughter). Whether you're poor or not, having your children pad your income isn't a viable solution, nor is it efficient, and yet it is the short-term solution the free market demonstrably arrived at.
    - tc 17y ago
      I take a false dichotomy charge seriously. I think you misunderstand me. I'm certainly not defending the FLSA's farm exemption, which was clearly just a bow to a powerful special interest group [1]. Of course children don't want to work on farms or in factories. Does anyone want to work in a factory? My point is simply that if you go to some random third-world country where children are working in factories, and you do nothing else than prevent them from working in factories, you very likely have not increased their quality of life. To your horror, you will see an increase in children scrounging for food in dumpsters. You will see them selling wares on the street. And you will see fewer families escaping a brutal life of farm labor to seek a better life in cities. Your point about free markets also misses the mark. You could repeal all the child labor laws today in the US, and you would not find (a statistically significant number of) factories hiring children for the simple reason that with modern industrial techniques children wouldn't even be productive enough to justify their space on a factory floor. This is part of the reason why teenage unemployment is so high even though teens will work for minimum wage. [1] Not to say that I think much harm comes from this today.
dfranke 17y ago
You can get away with one, really -- protection of private property, with one's own body defined as a property. However, it's probably easier to codify without an accompanying philosophical treatise if you write it as three to four laws, banning violence, theft, fraud, and possibly defamation.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Defamation is a combination of fraud and violence. The problem with your scheme is the protection of the commons.
  - derefr 17y ago
    It might not work today, but if one day we create strong AI, we can create (a disinterested) one called "the Environment", and give it the property rights to everything not currently considered private.
alain94040 17y ago
You do realize, of course, that your goal of having only 10 laws would fall in the exact pitfall described by the original poster, which is how vague laws can be. Once a law is broad and vague, it is subject to interpretation and may become subjective. Which is the original point of this article. Sorry, no solution found yet :-)

tptacek 17y ago

The law can be fair or the law can be simple.

stratomorph 17y ago
Unfortunately, it can also be neither. It's easier to simplify than make it fair.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Your first point is well taken. Your second point isn't. A lot of things aren't easy, and we do them anyways because they're right.
aaronblohowiak 17y ago
It is easier to abide by simple, though unfair, law than complicated and arguably fair law.
jbellis 17y ago
That's a good sound bite, but I don't agree that a simple law must inherently be unfair. In particular, I think that a simple law is likely to achieve greater fairness in a specific area than a complex one, even if neither is perfectly fair for whatever definition of fair.

pyre 17y ago

I guess you should also define 'laws.' Some 'laws' do things like levy taxes or tariffs. Because they are 'laws' they make it a crime to avoid then, but by themselves they are not something that seeks to make criminals.

Devilboy 17y ago

Congress will be OK with this I think, they'll just make each law span 1000s of pages.

jbellis 17y ago

Alternatively, Milton Friedman suggested that all laws should have an expiration date.

Adam503 17y ago
I'd rather see the endless mountains of right wing nonsense Milton Friedman wrote had that expiration date