4 ms·

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

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.
        tc 17y ago
        That would be the West Virginia Supreme Court, not SCOTUS. http://www.huntingtonnews.net/state/090605-rutherford-statetanyaharden.html http://www.huntingtonnews.net/state/090605-rutherford-statet... And in any case, arguing around the edges of self-defense is a far cry from the sort of felony paperwork violations that got us into this discussion. So perhaps the most clarifying question I could ask is: how many examples can you find of case law criminalizing paperwork mistakes with no criminal intent or intent to harm others, as compared to how many examples of that are there in statute law?
  - defen 17y ago
    > an accumulation of precedents which would effectively become a massive and complex legal code in itself. Common law? Worked out pretty well for the English for about 1000 years.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

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.
        tc 17y ago
        That would be the West Virginia Supreme Court, not SCOTUS. http://www.huntingtonnews.net/state/090605-rutherford-statetanyaharden.html http://www.huntingtonnews.net/state/090605-rutherford-statet... And in any case, arguing around the edges of self-defense is a far cry from the sort of felony paperwork violations that got us into this discussion. So perhaps the most clarifying question I could ask is: how many examples can you find of case law criminalizing paperwork mistakes with no criminal intent or intent to harm others, as compared to how many examples of that are there in statute law?
- defen 17y ago
  > an accumulation of precedents which would effectively become a massive and complex legal code in itself. Common law? Worked out pretty well for the English for about 1000 years.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]