There has never been a successful society of an serious complexity that had law that could be codified in a form where one person could understand them all. In feudal England prior to the ascension of the common law courts, instead of law you had power: the King (acting through representatives) or lower lords would adjudicate disputes and regulate society.
Saying "we have too many laws--nobody can know them all at once" is like saying "Linux has too many lines of code--nobody can understand it all at once." The complexity is unavoidable. You can shift it around, but you can't get rid of it.
It's probably not necessary and maybe not possible for it to be possible for one person to know and understand all of the laws for a society to be large, prosperous, fair and just. It probably is possible to have all the laws published on a government-run website that's free for all to access, indexed and cross-referenced.
Furthermore, it is probably possible for most reasonable people in such a society to know what fields of human endeavor are regulated under the law and to look up and understand the applicable regulations. Of course, some fields and their associated regulations are very technical, but it seems to be a reasonable goal that anyone with enough expertise to work in such a field, even as an amateur can also understand the associated laws.
There has never been a successful society of an serious complexity that had law that could be codified in a form where one person could understand them all.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we take that as true... the fact that something hasn't been done yet does not necessarily prove that it's impossible. If everyone simply accepted the status quo as inevitable, we would never make any progress at all.
No, it suggests that it is not in the interests of the powers that be to make things easy and efficient. A hypothesis for which there is much independent evidence.
For example when a regulated group achieves regulatory capture, it is in their interests to create new regulations of great complexity. See, for instance, the way that under Bush regulations on the financial industry increased, at the same time as the amount to which those regulations kept incumbents from doing what they wanted to decreased.
Heres an example from the UK. Like everywhere in the world we have laws which govern how you construct buildings. In most cases the actual law concerning disabled access just says 'PART M ACCESS TO AND USE OF BUILDINGS
Access and use
M1. Reasonable provision shall be made for
people to:
(a) gain access to; and (b) use
the building and its facilities.'[0]
There is then a whole set of pre approved conventions for what constitutes 'reasonable provision'. But crucially if you could show that, say, maglev chariots would satisfy this part of the regulation rather than a ramp then you can do this. About 10 years ago I also worked briefly on a building in New York and I was surprised how inflexible the building codes were. I don't claim to fully understand the code, but in some cases the law even appeared to specify a particular manufacturers products had to be used. From this, I suspect that the US has a culture of writing over complicated and voluminous laws, but I don't know enough to say if this is really the case. Maybe someone can argue otherwise?
[0] http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/uploads/br/BR_PDF_ADM_2004....
Do you believe we have a relatively prosperous society because of an excess of laws, or do we have one in spite of an excess of laws and would have even more wealth and prosperity without these laws?
There are two separate issues here: the scope of regulatory institutions (in the broad sense of the word "regulatory") and how much guidance is provided via law for the exercise of regulatory power within that scope. The volume of law is a function of these two variables.
I think the size of our regulatory institutions are, within an order of magnitude, consistent with the needs of our enormous and complex society. Within that scope, I would favor codifying less and leaving more to the discretion of regulatory bodies. That would lead to a reduction in the volume of law in trade for an accretion of power in regulatory bodies. I think dramatic reductions in the scope of regulation would lead to diminished prosperity. I don't think there is a practical way to reduce the volume of law while holding both variables constant.
So in short, I don't think we have an "excess" of law, at least not within an order of magnitude. It's hard to argue with success--America and England are the two most legalistic societies in the history of the world, and are also the two most successful. I think the scope of their regulatory institutions should get some credit for that success, a basic enabler of highly complex, integrated, organized, specialized industrial society.
As an aside, consider something like the internet. The internet has a lot of "law": Ethernet, LTE, TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, JS, DOC, PDF, SMTP, POP, etc. And that's just for the relatively simple task of exchanging two dimensional mostly textual documents! Nobody implements all these correctly, but would the internet be as successful without them?
Fundamentally, we need some people telling everyone what to do and how to do it. At some level. You can't build the world we live in without that. There are various ways to do it, but law is how you do it in a mostly democratic manner.
I generally agree with you about the necessity of complexity, but the "law" of the internet is actually a counterexample: Nobody enforces it. If you want to start with something that vaguely resembles HTML and make a bunch of changes and call it XML and start using it, nobody comes to your door with a warrant for your arrest and locks you in a cell, or even sues you for breach of contract. It's quintessentially private ordering, where everybody does it the same (to the extent that they do) voluntarily because in those cases compatibility with others is more advantageous than diverging from the standard.
And it is probably worth looking through the laws for instances where consensus-based processes like that could, perhaps not eliminate, but move some of the complexity from the regulatory system where it serves as a trap for the unwary into voluntary standards that work because it's in everyone's interest to follow them.
At the same time, you can still have a set of guidelines and issue warnings (but not penalties) for violations so that people will have notice that if the evil the guidelines are intended to prevent occurs as a result of their violation they'll be responsible for it. Sort of like a compiler warning. But if no evil results because you're doing something sensible but merely unanticipated, or because you've taken some alternative precautions with similar effectiveness, then no penalty would attach as long as no evil occurs.
This approach probably works best where the consequences of a violation don't involve risk of physical harm. Allowing a certain amount of risk of economic harm that the perpetrator is required to compensate for or be punished for causing in the event it occurs is much more palatable than the same when the risk is physical injury, because economic harm can be perfectly compensated for or insured against in ways that physical injury obviously can't.
> I generally agree with you about the necessity of complexity, but the "law" of the internet is actually a counterexample: Nobody enforces it.
It's a counter example in the context of a discussion about alternative ways to enforce (or not) rules, but not in a discussion about the complexity of the rules themselves.
As for enforcement, I agree it's interesting to look at examples of cooperative processes, but a relevant distinction is that breaking rules on the internet don't usually have consequences to other people. When they do, we do get calls to "enforce" the rules, e.g. in the context of net neutrality.
>It's a counter example in the context of a discussion about alternative ways to enforce (or not) rules, but not in a discussion about the complexity of the rules themselves.
I guess I'm trying to distinguish between rules (that are enforced) and standards or principles that are adhered to voluntarily, with the point being that you can in many cases reduce complexity in the rules by moving it somewhere else that doesn't require coercion to operate.
>As for enforcement, I agree it's interesting to look at examples of cooperative processes, but a relevant distinction is that breaking rules on the internet don't usually have consequences to other people.
I would think they generally would: If someone doesn't follow the standard then compatibility is impaired and the users of that software won't be able to interact fully or at all with users of software that does comply with the standard. That certainly negatively impacts them if they desire that compatibility, we just haven't chosen to make that negative impact illegal/punishable in most cases.
>When they do, we do get calls to "enforce" the rules, e.g. in the context of net neutrality.
Network neutrality is probably a bad example of "internet" regulation because despite the name it's really telecommunications regulation, which is a very different animal. The need for network neutrality comes from the existence of other telecommunications regulations: If (hypothetically) Uncle Sam didn't exclusively license the wireless spectrum or provide only select companies with massive subsidies and access to eminent domain to lay cable then there would be no call for network neutrality, but once the government steps in to establish a monopoly or cartel it then has to limit its power.
I would think the better example of your point would be Microsoft being hit with antitrust for breaking compatibility with Java in breach of the license.
That's not true, the Code of Hammurabi had 282 laws which really was it. Now most people could not read but the average person had a much better understanding of what to avoid doing. The issue is the separation between well understood laws with fuzzy edge cases and laws that people simply don't know about.
I wouldn't call ancient Babylon a "seriously complex" society. Pre-industrial societies have limited complexity. When everyone is mostly a self-sufficient farmer on his own land minding his own business, the need for law is dramatically lessened than industrial societies where all the necessities of sustaining one life may be the product of the labor of thousands of different people all interacting with each other.
Also: Babylon was essentially a dictatorship. You don't need law when one person is empowered to call all the shots.
Babylon had large city's and a range of industry's. We are not talking about self sufficient farmers but weavers, blacksmiths, potters, architects, construction workers, priests, teachers, warriors, etc. They dealt with complex issues like what happens when you build someone a house and it falls down killing the son of the person that bought the house.
I think social complexity scales non-linearly with size and population density (like code complexity), and also scales with things like the number of people possibly affected by one person's activity. Our society is easily millions of times more complex than ancient Babylon.
That's more or less irrelevant to to the legal code. Consider what laws could we remove with 150 million people or how dealing with 600 million people force a lot of new legal complexity.
What really leads to complexity in the legal code is the level of institutionalized corruption. AKA only companies owned by someone living within 50 miles of X and 30 miles of Y may do XYZ. Coupled with the age of the legal system which adds cruft over time.
> That's more or less irrelevant to to the legal code.
Complexity in the society the legal code is designed to govern is irrelevant to the complexity of that legal code?
> What really leads to complexity in the legal code is the level of institutionalized corruption. AKA only companies owned by someone living within 50 miles of X and 30 miles of Y may do XYZ.
Facebooks social graph is incredibly complex, the code that maintains it is slightly more complex than what you would need for 1/10 the users and 1/100th the social graph.
Yes, that law was an exaggeration but there are plenty of examples that include specifics on where the headquarters is which is effectively the same thing.
As to pork, the 50 billion sandy bill 17 billion relating to sand and then a bunch of random junk such as 33 million for Amtrack which is a for profit company. Now in this case nobody felt the need to hide it, but there are plenty of past spending bills aka law that have really specific contract requirements. EX: 693,000$ (~1/20,000th the budget) for beef improvement research in Missouri and Texas went to the Beef Improvement Federation as the only group meeting the requirements despite not being directly named in law. Granted by it's self not a big deal but plenty of things such as vary narrow import tarrifs stick around ex: refined vs raw sugar. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/sc019
Really, though, if we all backed up a bit, I think many of us would agree with some of both sides in this discussion, like throwaway's general point that efforts to simplify legal codes could be very valuable, even if we probably don't want to rigidly subscribe to the "someone should be able to easily learn all laws" test.
Linux is designed with a much friendlier user interface. I see no way of doing this in America, but I'd like to see an experimental society where engineering principles are applied to writing the laws.
Saying "we have too many laws--nobody can know them all at once" is like saying "Linux has too many lines of code--nobody can understand it all at once." The complexity is unavoidable. You can shift it around, but you can't get rid of it.