[jacques_chester]

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this.

Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.

Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field. We can do a lot of things to simply make essential complexity go away while we bicker amongst ourselves about accidental complexity.

Law can't do that. Law must treat all cases, all combinations, as they arise. Every single day a configuration of people, motives and circumstances emerges that has never before emerged, could not have been foreseen and which may never occur again. The law must still apply.

Law is hard because the problem domain is everything humans do.

Let me know how many story points you think that scope is worth.

[genwin]

> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.

[jacques_chester]

Again, I must insist that folk can only take this view because they have not studied law.

Law's complexity is not by design. Much of case law and legislation is about refactoring existing principles into something simpler.

The complexity of law is emergent from the problem domain. It doesn't require a conspiracy against the public to be that way. It merely requires the existence of a sufficiently large and diverse public.

[shabble]

> Law's complexity is not by design. Much of case law and legislation is about refactoring existing principles into something simpler.

Although it seems like there is also the accretion of "legalistic debt" (c.f. technical debt) when changes are made in response to (the perception of) urgent, high-profile problems.

It seems that, much like software, it's a lot easier to add clauses to, or make minor changes to existing laws than it is to write a new, much simpler version that would cover all the same ground, get it passed, and repeal the older version.

I'm also curious about what effect changes to a particular law have on precedent based on an interpretation of an older version.

[jacques_chester]

There's a certain amount of legislation which is of the be-seen-to-be-doing-something variety. But that too gets reformed now and then. Lots of legislators are ex-lawyers, they hanker to tidy the place up inbetween shitting on everyone.

> It seems that, much like software, it's a lot easier to add clauses to, or make minor changes to existing laws than it is to write a new, much simpler version that would cover all the same ground, get it passed, and repeal the older version.

Like software, it's easy to underestimate the complexity of the existing system and to overestimate the advantages of a single, sharp cutover.

The current system is not perfect, but it largely works by groping towards better solutions over time. Legal systems where the official concept of law is "we designed it ab initio with Pure Reason (tm)" tend to be just as riddled with contradiction and complexity. They just lie to themselves about it.

> I'm also curious about what effect changes to a particular law have on precedent based on an interpretation of an older version.

Most of the time it is very easy to make the connection. Either it's new legislation, in which case the legislature will amend the clauses that a court has interpreted differently from what they considered to be the intent. Or it's case law, for which every precedent is named and referenced. You can trace every legal principle back to its first expression.

[anigbrowl]

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry.

Yes yes, and all crime is caused by the police, doctors make people sick, and weather forecasters hold people hostage to the elements.

[genwin]

Well, police get jobs and pensions from the law industry, like marijuana laws. Doctors in the US promote unnecessary procedures. (I was a potential victim of that just last week.) No shenanigans I'm aware of in weather forecasting, though.

[smsm42]

That's one of the reasons I am a libertarian. Less government means less complex law means less bugs and abuses of the law. If your government tries to say what you can or can not eat, for example, you need complex law to figure out what is cheese and how big the holes in it must be. If you can eat whatever you like and the government couldn't care less, you do not need any of that. So tell me - do we really need a law specifying which size holes in the cheese must be?

[jbooth]

Why would 'less government' be less complex law or less abuse of it?

'Less government' typically means spending less money on government employees, when you hear it from libertarians. Paper's cheap, word are free, and abusing the law is usually profitable on it's own.

[smsm42]

You talked to wrong libertarians then, or didn't listen very carefully. Spending less money on government functions is a consequence of less government, but far from being the goal of it. The goal of it is to lessen government intrusion in private lives and transaction costs for private persons caused by it. If the government does not regulate how your health insurance policy must look like, and leaves it to a contact between two private parties, you do not need a huge law that meticulously describes what such contract must cover and what the sides must do in order to be allowed to enter into a contract. If, however, the government wants to have a say in it, creation of such a law is inevitable.

Not having certain laws trivially prevent abuse of such laws - if there's no law prohibiting possession of certain plant, cops can not extort somebody in possession of such plant, can not hide such plant in somebody's vehicle in order to incriminate them, can not force one to perform illegal acts threatening that otherwise they'd be found guilty in possession of such plant, can not seize one's home, vehicle or money because they suspected him in possessing a prohibited plant. This made possible only by existence of the law that makes certain behavior a crime. If less behaviors are made a crime or deemed worthy of government intervention, less complex laws will be needed and less abuse of these laws will be possible - you can only abuse a law that gives you a power over somebody, but you can not abuse law that does not exist.

[lobster_johnson]

Surely the thing to advocate is less gratuitous regulation and more efficiency. Because no regulation at all is disastrous — without it we would still be living with lead paint, arsenic in our food, rat-filled restaurant kitchens and so on. Libertarianism espouses minimal state intervention, but it's clear that we actually do need a lot of intervention. At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

[smsm42]

You don't need an special "regulation" to not put arsenic into anybody's food. Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. Laws against murder existed well before Iron Age, so there's no need for lawmakers to sweat too much about how to regulate such thing.

If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to a better place. Your home, I suppose, is not rat-infested, yet how often the government checks it? Somehow you manage to keep rats out of your home without the government, don't you? Why do you think everybody else can't do the same? Are they, unlike you, lack some important parts in their brains that allow them to function independently? I doubt it.

>>> At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

Marketplace is by definition a voluntary interaction, and participants in voluntary interaction can claim abuse only in one case - when one of the parties were fraudulent and did not deliver their end of the bargain. In this case, indeed, the government needs to step in and enforce the deal - or provide some other satisfactory resolution. But that's not what current law code is doing, it is very far from it. It actually tries to mold the marketplace into the shape and form that politicians prefer, and that's where most of the abuses come from.

[lobster_johnson]

> Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder.

This is a very naive view. Pretty much everything is poisonous at high enough dosages, but there are plenty of poisonous chemicals that are not immediately harmful at low levels.

You can have a restaurant, a food manufacturer, a water utility etc. contaminate (intentionally or otherwise) their product with low doses of chemicals that over time will cause health issues or even fatalities.

The marketplace itself cannot regulate such abuses. Even if such contamination was punishable by law, the time lag would ensure that consumers would not realize the impact until long after, perhaps even after the statute of limitations has expired.

Just look at third-world countries to see how the lack of regulation works out. Or China.

> ... I suggest changing you patronage to a better place.

I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I? The entire point of health inspections is to find out what the consumer cannot possibly find out themselves.

> Why do you think everybody else can't do the same?

Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Companies don't work for you; they work for themselves. If they have no incentive to be good, they usually won't be good; because, say, it's less expensive to be highly hygienic. You just have to look at the literature of consumer abuses to see how companies will continually, eternally act for their own good, at the detriment of consumers.

[smsm42]

I don't understand, what's "naive" here? You say something may be poisonous, even at low doses. Poisoning people is a crime. I don't even see the question here.

>>> I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I?

Ever heard of reviews? Critics? Certifications? Yelp? Zagat? Michelin stars? It is fascinating that a grown adult obviously having access to the internet, in 2013, can sincerely claim he doesn't know how to figure out if a restaurant is any good. There's a huge industry built on doing just that. People are complaining they have to many apps on their phone to do that and get confused.

>>>> Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Successful, prominent politicians are regularly busted for infidelity. So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

[atombender]

You are missing the time component. Reviews don't matter if the effects take a decade to show themselves.

> Ever heard of reviews?

You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters.

> So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing that companies obviously could not self-police, since they are doing bad things all the time even with state policing; how is your reply relevant?

[jacques_chester]

There's a difference between legislation/regulation and case law. Hayek is particularly good to read on the distinction.

[smsm42]

US code is legislation/regulation. Case law of course would still exist even with minimal regulation, but absent byzantine network of legislation/regulation, it will be less complex, since less factors will be involved in the lawmaking. If you do not regulate how big soda cups must be to be able to be sold in a retail establishment, you do not need case law that defines what "sold in retail establishment" means, what "soda cup" means and is selling two small cups the same as selling a large one and what happens if two small cups look exactly like one big cup with a wedge in the middle. And so on. Congress creates over 50 federal crimes now each year, this makes the system more and more complicated every day, with bad consequences for everybody except lawyers that get to earn tons of money on navigating this insane labyrinth.

[joesb]

Also, if something use case comes up that your software didn't handle, you can write new code to handle it and rerun the old data. You cannot do that with law, you can't write new law and use it to punish past action.

[rkda]

So law is a machine learning problem?

[jacques_chester]

Judicata think so.