[arjie]

Ha, I really enjoy this description of the law. Very neat. Tickled my mind.

It struck me a while ago that almost no present law systems have a regularization or refactoring process. It is an entirely grown object that adds epicycles and it reminds me of the way our household personal agent would record memory until we gave it a self-reflection activity. It seems like a large number of states enacted sunset legislation in the 70s and 80s and many of them got rid of it shortly thereafter. I wonder what troubles they encountered.

One amusing (to me) observation using the model of edits in the OP is that if you say "Section 171 Part 3 is amended to now add the text 'never' at this location" and then later have "Section 171 Part 3 is amended to now add the text 'almost' right before 'never'" you need to have each such edit also be followed by a revalidation of the age of the entire section or you get amusing results due to the text changes.

A fun read for a later afternoon, perhaps.

[dgreisen]

Regularization and refactoring is actually an integral part of most legal systems. Most jurisdictions in the US go through periodic (1-5 decade) "recodifications" of their law, where the code is reorganized to clean up all the path dependencies of the organically grown law. Restatements do something similar for common law (although they are arguably becoming less influential). Non-US jurisdictions often accomplish this by periodically repealing and replacing laws in their entirety.

[arjie]

Huh, TIL. I suppose California's proposition system does sort of interfere with this process since a standardization of rules isn't realistically possible when it touches this stuff.