Maintenance of law

[eugenekop]

I am a software engineer, and I know that code has to be maintained. You constantly how to tidy it up, remove unneeded portions, reorganize and reorder. But what about laws? The law book is only getting bigger and bigger. Laws never get canceled, and I've never heard about law cancellation movements. What can we do about it?

[danda]

I am a software engineer, and I know that code has to be maintained. You constantly how to tidy it up, remove unneeded portions, reorganize and reorder. But what about laws? The law book is only getting bigger and bigger. Laws never get canceled, and I've never heard about law cancellation movements. What can we do about it?

Hi eugene. I am a coder also, and have thought about this question often.

I am also a strong believer in the KISS ( Keep it simple, stupid ) principle. Basically it boils down to: Write the simplest code possible that does the job. Anything else is bloat.

In the context of laws, absolutely there is too much cruft, bloat, legacy code, whatever you want to call it. And they just keep piling up. A possible improvement of the existing system would be to add a sunset clause of 5? years to every new law. Additionally existing laws could be arbitrarily assigned a random sunset of 1-20 years. That way, for the next 20 years, there would be a bunch of old laws expiring that the politicians would have to busy themselves with either re-passing or letting expire.

I'm sure there are other ways. That's just one idea. And it is just a band-aid.

Ultimately, I believe a much improved form of government would be one that has just one single PRINCIPLE: The libertarian non-agression principle based on property rights. Or in simpler terms, the "Golden Rule".

There would be no other laws, and no "common law" ( legacy code ). All disputes would be heard in court (or arbitration) and would be decided based on the particular facts of that case weighed against the non-agression principle. Precedent need not apply, except perhaps in the minds of the jurors.

This of course, will never happen in the U.S. In software terms, it is a complete societal re-write. Or bigger, switching to a new architecture and operating system.

This would also be a form of government that can apply at all scales, from neighborhood to world.

Someday I hope to write a book on the subject, that will perhaps be read and implemented by future generations. I don't think that ours has the stones for it.

[Matt Collins]

Get JMDrake into this discussion. He is a software engineer turned attorney.

[eugenekop]

Wow Danda, time expiration for laws is a very good idea. Congratz.