[warble]

As an engineer, I build a test for every design I put forth. The test validates the design against the intent of the design. You could approach law this way.

In other words, every law has an intent. Make it so before any law can be passed, you must design a test to validate the law against the intent to be run at some point in the future. Then if the test fails outright, or begins to fail over time (some laws work at first, but fail later) then you pull the law out of the books.

I know this is very naive, and over-simplified. But I like the idea.

[lhc-]

The thing is, most laws already do this. They are proposed to affect some specific situation which has already occurred (like laws in response to online bullying, etc). The problem isn't that laws are just passed randomly without a specific case in mind: the problem is that they are often broad enough to have unintended consequences on other tangential cases. I don't think the problem is that no tests exist; I think the problem is more like bad test coverage. Laws can have wide reaching implications and it's very difficult to find every applicable situation before they come up.

[warble]

Sure, they have a situation in mind, but they are not actually tested. At least I've never heard of an instance. (I'm probably wrong)

[nitrogen]

It would be interesting if a tagging or search system could dig up all old court decisions that would have a different outcome under a proposed new law. Those could form the initial test cases.