[jgmmo]

So because laws are not perfect, and have at times in the past illustrated issues in our society, because they are the result of a long-term evolution, they can not be trusted? Ever?

Do you not think that in the long-run that our law will make all that is universally agreed to be unethical and harmful to others also illegal?

What I'm saying is law marches in the direction of ever improving it's fit to society. You seem to throw that out the window and think of law as some unrelated and untrustable thing.

[pizza]

Why should the law evolve to be more just? If anything, wouldn't the laws that were most fair be the ones that due to their age in spite of history's blows indicates preferential selection, and that age of the law may correlate to the relatively simplicity of its authoring government and hence maybe fewer externalities. We now live in a period of perennial voter disenfranchisement, and it seems that the civil rights movement will not have the lasting stopping power it was perceived to wield to cement incremental progress in our society. I think that recent legislation, although almost never as surely heinous as chattel slavery or slaughter of Native Americans or racial quotas etc., that there is a difference between the 'what we think is worth keeping' and the 'what we can expect to be exasperatingly legislated in the near future'

[AnimalMuppet]

In particular, if you want to think of the law in evolutionary terms, it has two different pressures on it: pressure to become more just, and pressure to become a better tool to protect the powerful. It is not obvious that pressure to become more just is stronger.

[burkaman]

"law marches in the direction of ever improving it's fit to society"

Right, we're all in agreement here. Law should conform to society, society need not conform to law. When the law is wrong, we can resist it, and when the law is absent, we can replace it.