[tophercyll]

Consider a bicameral legislature where newly elected representatives serve a four year term in the lower body. Their sole responsibility is the review/renewal of existing laws. Every law must be renewed every four years.

After completing their term in the lower body, the representatives graduate to serve a four year term the higher house. Here, they are entrusted with the power of making new laws.

Elections are staggered (similar to the US sentate), so every year one fourth of the members are elected, one fourth move up, and one fourth retire. This way, the chambers have institutional memory and transitions are smooth.

Both houses have the power to change the legislative topography of the nation. Because newly elected representatives serve in the lower house, when citizens vote to change the direction of the country, the first response to public opinion is the removal of existing laws. Only after serving a term in the lower house can laws be added.

To make this kind of system successful, there might need to be a legal review process that demands small, unbundled laws. Or perhaps a simple word count like @derefr and @mseebach suggest.

I guess the fact that we even think about this stuff pretty much means we're geeks. =)

[stcredzero]

As it stands, the State of California has a bureau that uses software to ensure new laws do not conflict with existing ones.

[igurari]

Do you have a little more information about that? I'm curious to know how the software would do that, and how sophisticated it is. I would imagine it is simply based on user input representations of the bills, and fairly simple tests, but even that would be difficult to do accurately/effectively.

[stcredzero]

I was involved in a software project there in the late 90's. Their software back then seemed to just consist of a search engine on the text of the bills. There may have been other tools I didn't know about. My project there was fairly limited.

My (probably incomplete or incorrect) understanding was that they would vet a new law by doing keyword searches concerning the main points of the new law. So if a there was a new law about people's lawns, they'd search for "lawn" and whatever other keywords or synonyms would occur to them.

[igurari]

Thanks. Makes sense. I was curious because I've spent much time developing quality case parsing and semantic analysis technologies, and one of the very difficult problems I've been interested in - but not yet approached - is automatically parsing and analyzing legislation. I think there is much headway that will be made there in the coming years/decade, but it's a tricky problem.