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[Mongrel]

Naw, not really, but I saw this overly-opinionated exchange and was wondering what people here thought.

*previous, unrelated argument with redneck troll, not involved in the exchange below*
Lawyer: Do you seriously believe that you, personally, should understand every law that passes or otherwise that law is a bad idea?
IT guy: YES! Absolutely!
IT guy: If I am responsible for knowing the law, then they are responsible for making the law knowable. The impossibly complex myriad of laws is a big part of the reason why this country is fucked up.
Beltway dude: It's really simple to imagine a country with incredibly simplified laws that is also terrible.
Peanut gallery: Could you provide an example?
Lawyer: [@ IT guy] You want to be responsible for knowing the entirety of the law?
Peanut gallery: We're already responsible for knowing a bunch of the law, including the laws of every foreign country and state that I purchase stuff from.
IT guy: We are held responsible, and no one, not even an expert that spends their lives studying the law can know all of the laws that apply to them.
IT guy: This has created a society where we pretty much do what we think is right, and we hope not to break the law. This empowers through selective enforcement (itself not a bad thing), certain people to use the law to harass just about anyone they want, because everyone is constantly breaking laws they are unaware of. This also breeds a disrespect of the law, and law enforcement. All of this is bad for society.

The lawyer in that is a friend of mine, a very reasonable and intelligent guy. The Beltway guy is sort of an acquaintance and is an interesting guy, but is also a bit of a dick (one day he sort of decided he makes too much money to actually hang out with any of us IRL). The others are just Internet People whom I don't really know well.

So is this the next stage in the evolution of the whole right-wing/libertarian subversion/dismissal of government as a useful institution? I mean, if so, it's well done. That's a much more attractive way to frame things, not to mention it's also subtler.

On the other hand, I can at least see the attractiveness of it. I mean, a penchant for long-winded posts aside, I actually appreciate clarity, brevity, and simplicity a lot.

But again, I also think there's a bit of bullshit to the "nobody really knows the law" and "everybody just does what they think is right" claims. I think people know the substance of the law in most of the ways they touch on them in daily life. Take driving for example: When people speed or run red lights, or whatever, they're pretty cognizant of the basic law and it's penalties. Maybe they don't have the exact legislation memorized, but is that actually analogous to not knowing the law?

[Thad]

There's a bit in Rule 34 about the police requiring a complex AI to actually determine what the laws ARE.  I think it's a clever reductio ad absurdum, and I DO think we're hitting a point where laws are numerous and complex and it isn't possible for the average person to understand what laws he may or may not be breaking at any given moment.  And yeah, we ARE breaking various laws pretty much all the time.

You make a good point that most people still know the basic, important stuff.  Traffic protocol is an example of something that's pretty important; most people drive their cars every day, and that's one situation where the law isn't just a helpful recommendation but necessary to keep from getting yourself or somebody else killed.

We ARE responsible for knowing laws that the average person can't, and shouldn't be expected to, reasonably understand.  Not knowing the law does not protect you from liability when you break it.  There's a pretty obvious problem there.

There's also the problem that the more complex a law is, the easier it is to sneak in loopholes.  Typically, loopholes favor the powerful and hold them to a different standard than the powerless.

On the other hand, part of why we've got representative government in the first place is that you can't expect everybody to have the specialized knowledge required to understand and pass laws.  We elect people to navigate the system on our behalf and act on our interests.

At least, that's the theory.  In practice, we tend to elect people based on simple, concrete soundbites.  Exactly the sort of easy-to-understand summations that we're talking about.

[R^2]

Everything I know about overcriminalization I got from that Illustrated Guide to Law that was drifting around a while back.

[Thad]

Hadn't seen that before; it's excellent.  Thanks for the link.

[Mongrel]

I'd seen that blog before, but not that particular link. Very nice.

[Sharkey]

Much as libertarians make my teeth itch, there is a good point there. One of the best things to happen to law was when Justinian was all like "fuck all y'all" and took the most basic bits for the corpus juris civilis. In retrospect it's kind of funny that "Byzantine" became synonymous with the opposite of that kind of simplicity (also metro-faggotry.)

Of course, given my druthers I'd have the whole thing boiled down to "don't be a dick or you'll get punched." Which I know doesn't really work, but makes me feel good in an upright ape sort of way.

[Mongrel]

There's also a record of that happening at least once or twice in past Chinese Empires, including once where the laws were actually changed to just "Don't kill, Don't harm, don't steal."

Not that that lasted either, but kruft knows no race or territory.

[TA]

Yeah, if men were angels and all that.  It's a nice idea to cut law down from volumes to soundbytes, but it never ever works - the reason that laws get convoluted is that they have to cover every permutation of events, because things they don't cover get abused by the unscrupulous to the detriment of everyone else.  There's room for reform at times, but it's simply not feasible for a comprehensive set of laws to boil down that easily.  Blame the infinite creativity of weasels, and the human desire for consistency.

[Brentai]

The problem is that after a certain point the weasels are advantaged by the sheer complexity and numerous loopholes of the law itself.

There is a optimal level for this.  It's not constant or easy to define, but one thing I can say with confidence is that we have clearly exceeded it.

[sei]

(This is probably all superfluous, because mens rea is already a thing.)

Suppose law must be too complex for all of its targets to comprehend it in full.

Can changing how law is shaped and enforced help mitigate the "surprise, you're fucked by something unintuitive" problem?

Shaping Adjustment

• "Basic" laws are classified as mandatory knowledge. Murder, assault, theft, or whatever. These are extremely limited, and built into societal curriculum, so that short of severe mental illness, there's no plausible way the laws are unknown. These can be enforced the way our modern laws are.
• "Complex" laws must be renewed and reviewed after a certain period. This prevents shit that naive ancestors and profiteering lobbyists put in place from holding society back (as long or as cheaply).

Why do this?

• It's very hard for the light-walleted to see their interests met by enacting legal change. This shifts burden from unwitting victims having to try to roll back stupid things, over to moneyed parties having to continually justify its existence. In the event that the moneyed parties lose interest, the law stops affecting society.
• This helps prevent legal cruft from accumulating. Documentation pertaining to the prior justification/need for these laws should be kept around. Implementation detail: the abstract (tl;dr) version needs to exist in unambiguous and clear language, so that future congressmen and citizens can understand what the fuck is going on, for when the law comes up for review.

Enforcement

• "Basic" laws are enforced as they are now.
• "Complex" laws involve warnings, C&Ds, etc. instead of immediate fines or incarceration. This gives you a bit of the "ignorance is no excuse" factor living on, but limits the life-ruining gotcha factor.

Problems
Obvious loopholes exist. E.g., responsibility passed off from person to person in a company so that each year, a new "innocent" gets a warning, rather than anyone seeing prison time. Unless closed, this would have dire financial and environmental impact.

The proposed system shifts a non-trivial intellectual burden onto determining which laws are basic/necessary vs which laws are "complex" (beyond the need/benefit for everyday comprehension of its subjects) and that it could be prohibitively expensive to vet laws for renewal in a meaningful way.

EDIT:
That law comic is pretty great. Kept reading. They eventually touch on this very issue, including a couple solutions of their own.