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> I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a ton of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad harvests in the manner you describe. Anglo legal systems aren't more sophisticated merely because they've been in development longer. It's that English society was legalistic and willing to readily embrace legal abstractions. Think of the conceptual leap from a traditional right to property (i.e. the legal system will keep someone from taking my land by force), to the Anglo notion of property (nearly any set of rights and obligations between parties can be wrapped into a contract that can be held and traded like property). The latter concept is tremendously enabling of markets, but it's not obvious. It was invented by a society that was totally comfortable thinking in legal abstractions, and that proved to be a competitive advantage. > One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them run at acceptable performance. Let's analogize the legal system to a computer operating system. My phone runs Kit Kat, whose big feature is that it can "comfortably" support phones with as little as 512 MB of RAM. This is almost 10x as much RAM as I had in my high-end desktop computer some years ago (PII-era), which ran NT 4.0 just fine. Operating systems get slower and more complex every year, but nobody seems to really see that as enough of a reason to forgo the benefits of the complexity. Nobody cares about absolute overhead, but relative overhead. In the U.S., the legal sector's share of GDP has been steadily declining since the 1970's. > The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is ultimately consumed by humans. Legal documents are much more like formal design specifications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification) than user documentation. Legal documents are references against which disputes can be resolved. Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute about, say, whether a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the specification. |
Yes, but you shouldn't look at relative overhead in terms of the legal sector's share of the GDP, because that doesn't tell you the whole story. What you need to look at is relative overhead in terms of the average person's ability to afford legal services. Essentially, it comes down to this: if people are able to use the threat of litigation to bully others because they know that lawsuits would be too expensive for those others, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
>>Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute about, say, whether a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the specification.
I'd say that if users cannot use the feature because they don't understand it, it doesn't matter whether it was implemented properly: it's a failed feature.
Essentially what we are asking people is to abide by the law, but making the law too complicated to understand by the average person. Do you honestly not see the problem with that? I read somewhere that everyone is a criminal because we just have too many laws and people break them all the time without realizing it.