[forgottenpass]

This may be an inevitable response to the ongoing proliferation of unnecessary laws?

It's wishful thinking to expect the degradation of a law be inversely correlated to is value to society (however you want to calculate that, "necessity" or otherwise).

[jessaustin]

We weren't really talking about individual laws. It is the institution of Law in general that has been degraded, and that is partly due to all the extra laws. Each new law makes someone's life better, or else it wouldn't have been lobbied into existence, but on average each new law makes life worse for the public as a whole. The public knows this at some level, so it's understandable that the average person now has less respect for the Law than the average person did in e.g. 1950.