WMN: t3_2qrlmm_t1_cn9epdo

[TITLE]

CMV: Any given aspect of the legal system should be short and simple enough that an average high school graduate could fully memorize it

[txwatson]

CLARIFICATIONS BASED ON ANTICIPATED CONFUSION: (1.) I'm **not** saying simple enough that **all** high school students **should** memorize them; I'm saying simple enough that almost anyone could, if they were struck by the impulse to make that unusually large commitment, do so. Like, most people don't memorize all of Romeo and Juliet. But most people, I think, if they really wanted to, **could.** (2.) I'm not interested in hearing any arguments that are based in any way on what the laws are, right now, except by way of comparison. This includes the constitution. Seriously -- this isn't what I want to argue here, but I'm 100% on board with trashing the US constitution and starting from scratch with new documents, so appealing to the constitution is not on topic. I'm not a fan of extreme simplification, but I think the American legal system has gotten out of hand in complexity. I think the law should be simple enough that close to anybody could reasonably know the mechanics of all the laws likely to apply to them. Ideally, it should be a relatively simple feat of memorization to learn the names of all the categories of law; the number of laws in each category; and the basic mechanics of the enforcement of that category's laws. By categories, I mean things like: criminal law; the tax code; any given category of regulation by profession (medical, construction, IT, and so on). I'd be fine with memorizing all the laws being a feat on par with memorizing the Bible; but it should be well within the average citizen's capacity to know all the laws likely to apply to them, word-for-word or close to it. Edit 9:55: CLARIFICATIONS BASED ON CONFUSION THAT HAS OCCURRED: (1.) I am not arguing that a shorter legal code is by definition easy to understand. I am not arguing that the average High School student should be able to achieve a lawyer's level of expertise in any given aspect. I'm defending the memorization criterion as a way to limit the total length and vagueness of a set of laws. EDIT 8:35 the following morning: Nobody last night since I went to bed made any points that I haven't already addressed more than once, so I'm done individually responding unless somebody comes up with something new. For the answers to all the posts since I went to bed: see anticipated clarifications 1 and 2, clarification based on actual confusion 1, [this comment,](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/2qrlmm/cmv_any_given_aspect_of_the_legal_system_should/cn91esr) and literally the name of the subreddit. _____ > *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*

[eldiablo22590]

The law is already incredibly easy and anyone with a high school education and enough time on their hands should be able to pick it up in a pretty straightforward manner. Law is just a combination of semantics and analogy and neither of those require more than an average high school education. Past that, why should memorization be a criteria? Do you think physicists or doctors memorize every little piece of information that they need to know? No, because it would be inefficient to put the effort in when you can just look up what you need to know on a whim. Memorization as a criteria is flawed in and of itself.

[Raintee97]

Why are you asking of the law that you don't ask of other professions. I mean would you ask the same about medicine. Should doctors have to write all medical journals so the layman could understand it? I mean medicine is about our body. Everyone should be able to have some understanding. We don't because it tends to be a good idea to let experts exist. The law code isn't just complex to be complex. It is complex because of the intricacies of law. Infact, what you want is already possible. The law code is open. People could find any law they wish and then do some research and gain some basic understanding. We can agree with medicine that there is a change for laymen to gain a great deal of information, but there is still a need for professionals with their expert knowledge. Why should the law be any different.

[txwatson]

[STA-CITE]>The law code isn't just complex to be complex. It is complex because of the intricacies of law. [END-CITE]That literally says "The law code isn't complex just to be complex, it's complex **because** it's complex." There are meaningful differences between the nature of law and the nature of medicine. Medicine is the practice of applying interventions into a complex natural system in order to produce certain desired effects. The law is a system of public agreement of the terms under which the state, which holds a monopoly on violent force, will or will not exercise that force on the population. The existence of complexity in the human body is a natural phenomenon. The existence of complexity in the law is either an accident due to poor management, or a deliberate effort by the lawmakers to give themselves as much leeway as possible to exercise their power. (More like a mix of both.) Medicine is a science. Law is politics. They are different. They are not comparable in any close metaphorical sense. There are disciplines that are closer to having qualities of both: Plumbing is a human-made system that is governed by arbitrarily decided rules, but also deals with the natural realities of fluid dynamics, the physics of metal piping, etc. The law has no grounding in a natural force, other than human psychology, and even in that, it's human psychology acting on human psychology on behalf of human psychology. The legal system is a set of treaties between the people and themselves. The level of complexity is infinitely adjustable, and the emergent phenomena that arise from those various levels of complexity have extraordinarily different, extraordinarily significant effects. One of the **major emergent effects** of a legal system that extends beyond the grasp of the average citizen is that the people who work within the legal system gain an extraordinary amount of power to wield that system in ways that the average citizen cannot predict. That -- that last paragraph there -- is exactly the major problem that I am offering a suggested remedy to.

[Raintee97]

If your limiting factor is being understood by those with a high school education, you're going to place artificial limits on the law system. Under the current idea, you can do your own research on any legal subject. Everything is open. Thousands of people do this when they decide to represent themselves or when they just want to know more about a subject. This can be done, today, if someone takes the time to become an expert on something. Instead of anyone of us taking the time to do so, we hire a professional to so. This is just like the computer I'm typing on now. It could be made so that it could be fixed by anyone, regardless of computer knowledge, but thankfully for me it isn't, so that I may have a much more complex machine. If you get what you want, you will just be artificially simplifying something that perhaps wouldn't benefit from such simplification. Sure are their areas that would benefit from some simplification, yes, but the answer isn't to rewrite the entire law system based on the lowest common intellectual denominator.

[txwatson]

High school graduate is not the lowest common intellectual denominator. Nevermind the serious classist and ableist problems with that idea, but the point of that arbitrary restriction was that it would be a reasonably common ability that could nonetheless not easily be ruled out on the basis that some people can't do it. It was a ballpark idea, and it could be fiddled with a bunch. You absolutely cannot do your own legal research to the extent I'm proposing. For one thing, you don't have access to the massive body of case law. For another, if you did, there's still literally more of it than you could read in a lifetime. As far as statutory law, there are millions of them. Professionals in the field have literally said that nobody knows how many laws there are in the tax code. I proposed memorizing romeo and juliet as a ballpark idea of how hard it should be. How hard it is right now to memorize any given subcategory of law is in the area of memorizing all of Shakespeare, including his correspondence and the lost plays. All of the law is artificially set. It's not natural. It does not emerge from the earth. There is no fountain o flaw. There is no tree of law. We make the legal system based on our needs, and right now it is **not meeting our needs.**

[Raintee97]

We have experts on this stuff so that we don't have to learn everything. This is a good thing. I mean if my computer breaks I can take it to the guy who has taken hours of his life to become really good at fixing computers. I can hire an engineer and mathematicians to make sure that the subway system runs as smooth as it can. If I want something welded, I can hire someone to do that job. I don't ask for all tasks requiring welding to be simplified so that anyone can do it. And I want all of this so that I don't have to either learn these skills and I get to use advanced concepts. For instance, there has to be a common interaction between two companies or entities that would require legal language that would be beyond a high school grad top grasp. Should these groups or companies not be able to complete their contract or such because doing so would be beyond a high school grad? Would you view limit what groups of people could do.

[txwatson]

This literally in no way responds to any of my points, anywhere in this or any other thread on this post or in the original post.

[Raintee97]

You're talking about simplifying the legal code. My two points are that we already solve the problem of complex systems by hiring experts and that simplifying the legal code might prevent business from being done.

[nyudo2]

Ideally, it should be a relatively simple feat of memorization to learn the names of all the categories of law; the number of laws in each category; and the basic mechanics of the enforcement of that category's laws. By categories, I mean things like: criminal law; the tax code; any given category of regulation by profession (medical, construction, IT, and so on). I'd be fine with memorizing all the laws being a feat on par with memorizing the Bible; but it should be well within the average citizen's capacity to know all the laws likely to apply to them, word-for-word or close to it. ──────── This is already the case.

[txwatson]

Source?

[nyudo2]

Common sense. Don't do things that are wrong. You don't list any sources, facts, or logical reasoning behind your belief.

[txwatson]

1. I was asking for a source of our claim that the categories of law are discrete and clearly memorizable, as opposed to fuzzy, ill-defined, and routinely shifting. 2. You know I'm not here to convince other people I'm right, don't you? Literally the purpose of this subreddit is to expose your views to criticism. I'm looking for critique -- structurally by the purpose of this subreddit the burden of proof is on you.

[klw]

[STA-CITE]>I'd be fine with memorizing all the laws being a feat on par with memorizing the Bible; but it should be well within the average citizen's capacity to know all the laws likely to apply to them, word-for-word or close to it. [END-CITE]I'm not sure I understand your point--is it that there are too many laws or that they are difficult to understand? I don't think that the ability to memorize a law or set of laws is a good measure of how understandable a law is. I can recite "Jabberwocky" from memory, but it's literally composed primarily of nonsense words. [STA-CITE]>I'm not a fan of extreme simplification, but I think the American legal system has gotten out of hand in complexity. [END-CITE]Do you have any evidence for this? The law is complex in order to reduce ambiguity. One of my favorite [examples](http://www.milwaukee-business-lawyer.com/why-does-legal-language-need-to-be-so-complicated/) is about vehicles. Say an ordinance is passed that is very simply written so that anyone can understand it. "No vehicles are allowed in the park." Seems straightforward, and anyone can understand it. But can they? According to the dictionary, a vehicle is a thing used for transporting people and goods. Could that be a bicycle? A wheelchair? Shopping cart? Stroller? Rollerblades? A pogo stick? A car? Truck? Motorcycle? Snowmobile? A rolling suitcase? So you'd have to refine that language. "No motorized vehicles are allowed in the park." But that doesn't quite work, does it? What about motorized wheelchairs? Or Segways? Or remote controlled toy cars and trucks? What about the trolley that's run *by* the park to get people from the boat launch to the parking lot? And what about that boat launch? Is it acceptable to bring a motorized vehicle into the park for the purposes of launching it into the public waterway? Too much ambiguity leaves too much room for argument, which is why the law is so complex. It surely can venture into needless complexity, but it would be impossible to distill the entire body of statutory documentation produced by one's county, state, and the federal government into a book the size of the Bible, even if you ruthlessly excised every law deemed to be outdated, redundant, or only applying to very specialized circumstances.

[txwatson]

[STA-CITE]>is it that there are too many laws or that they are difficult to understand? [END-CITE]Both, but mainly the former. And Jabberwocky is pretty comprehensible -- you kind of have to interpret it in bad faith to fail to get a coherent story out of it. [STA-CITE]>Do you have any evidence for this? The law is complex in order to reduce ambiguity. [END-CITE]Not to be overly glib but tell that to patent, copyright, and tax law. Vehicles are actually one of the categories where I think we're close to a good system, and could easily reach this goal. As for your park example: Let's define "Vehicle" as "a mechanical object or system with the function of carrying an adult person or persons." Then: "No unauthorized vehicles in the park." Then: "Mobility equipment for people with disabilities are authorized." And individual authorization for each food truck. There -- did that in less than the length of a Reddit post. And remember: as long as you can think of nitpicks that you yourself could answer in this thread, you're still pretty much making my case for me. As for your last paragraph: Yes, that's the point. It **would** be impossible to do that, and I think that's **bad.**

[klw]

[STA-CITE]> And Jabberwocky is pretty comprehensible -- you kind of have to interpret it in bad faith to fail to get a coherent story out of it. [END-CITE]You're missing the larger point, which is that easy memorization is not an adequate yardstick by which to measure comprehensibility. I also had to memorize huge portions of the periodic table for Chem II and O-Chem, but that didn't make me into a chemist. I can and have memorized all sorts of things, including stuff in languages I can't actually read or understand. [STA-CITE]>Not to be overly glib but tell that to patent, copyright, and tax law. [END-CITE]Those are definitely examples of laws in need of reform, but I don't think that the primary problem is that they're written in legalese. Many of these laws are founded on assumptions that are faulty or ethically problematic and are the object of influence by certain persuasive interests. Turning these laws into plain, clear English won't make them any less problematic unless we challenge the assumptions that many of these laws are built on. I'm focusing primarily on patent and copyright law, obviously. Tax law is one of the few areas where I think complexity *is* the problem and not just a byproduct of other problems in the legal system. [STA-CITE]>There -- did that in less than the length of a Reddit post. [END-CITE]Not really. You could drive trucks through the holes in your law. [STA-CITE]>Yes, that's the point. It would be impossible to do that, and I think that's bad. [END-CITE]But *why* is it bad? What laws are you breaking every day because you can't memorize them?

[txwatson]

[STA-CITE]>easy memorization is not an adequate yardstick by which to measure comprehensibility [END-CITE]That's not the point. The limitation isn't to make the law coherent to all high school students. Its purpose is to limit it in length and require it to be distinct and discrete. I would still expect people to get law degrees to fully understand it. And I have no idea what laws I'm breaking every day. I know I **am,** because I learn reasonably often about things I had no clue were illegal. **That** is the point. **A person cannot learn all the laws that apply to themself.** I do not now, nor will I ever, know all the laws that could possibly be used against me in some way. It is impossible for me to fully comprehend my vulnerability to a party with the motive and resources to wield the law against me in a vindictive spirit. And that is true of **every American.**

[ajswdf]

Could you give an example of some laws that are too complex for the typical person to understand? The most complicated type of laws that I know of are when it comes to taxes, and I'm willing to bet a typical person could learn all the tax laws (at least the ones that apply to individuals with typical incomes) if they really dedicated themselves to it. So I guess to answer your argument, I'd say our laws are already set up that way. The biggest barrier that would prevent the average person from understanding a given piece of law they're interested in would be the technical language used, but that language is required by laws because the laws have to be very specific.

[txwatson]

We literally don't know how many tax laws there are. Legislators and tax professionals have lost track. Copyright and patent laws are two categories of kinds of law that are complicated to the point of being incomprehensible -- professionals don't really know what is and isn't legal, they know what is and isn't safe territory (largely informed by whether or not possible victims can afford to sue) and the legal truths shake out on a case-by-case basis.

[NeilZod]

[STA-CITE]>and the legal truths shake out on a case-by-case basis [END-CITE]No matter how simple the rule, the variety and complexity of facts mandates applying rules on a case by case basis. The patent and copyright statutes can probably be memorized by your high school student. Unfortunately, both laws cover huge fields where one rule doesn't fit all. Patent law in particular is dealing with inventions - ideas that never existed before - and writing a rule today to cover what is new 70 years from now isn't easy.

[txwatson]

I can tell you right now that US copyright law isn't even entirely US copyright law -- significant chunks of it come from the United States vaguely agreeing over time to apply the rules of other countries' copyright treaties. Copyright in the US has been tweaked and hammered and wheedled to the point where it is literally routinely self-contradictory. I'm a writer, and literally one of the pieces of professional advice I've gotten is "Never take a writing contract to a non-copyright lawyer to evaluate, because anyone outside the field will tell you that most of this is unenforceable and insane." It is absolutely not within the scope of the average high school student's ability to memorize. It's not even within the scope of the average high school student's ability to **locate.**

[NeilZod]

You advocate an entirely too simple-minded application of law. Take negligence for example. The US rule is simple - it asks whether a duty exists and whether someone breached that duty leading to injury. Even with such a simple rule, we can still write multi-volume treatises because of the variety of situations that negligence covers. But you're moving the goalposts - I can't see a good reason to limit us to laws that a high school student can understand and give you meaningful advice on.

[txwatson]

I didn't say understand and give meaningful advice. I said memorize. I fully accept that law is extremely complicated and hard to fully comprehend. I think if you're going to make a profession in a type of law it should still take years of study and a specialized degree. This litmus test isn't about somehow metaphysically limiting how complicated human behaviors are allowed to get -- it's about limiting the actual sprawling incomprehensible vagueness of the text of the law itself.

[psykick5]

Many high school graduates are complete morons. I legal system that they could understand would be archaic.

[txwatson]

MEMORIZE. Not UNDERSTAND. The point is to limit the LENGTH OF THE DOCUMENT and the VAGUENESS OF ITS BOUNDARIES.

[heyjoe21]

The average highschooler's brain isn't fully developed yet, standards of simplicity would be more appropriate at what the average person in there mid 20's could understand and memorize. This is besides the fact that systems of law develop organically and evolve to there level of complexity out of necessity. Modern society needs laws as complex as they are, but its not in the average person's interest to have full knowledge of it. It's more efficient to have specialized members of society to study and practice in the complex legal system that modern society requires. P.S A comprehensive explanation of why your view is incorrect would require a law degree, it's pretty complicated.

[txwatson]

MEMORIZE. Not UNDERSTAND. The point is to limit the LENGTH OF THE DOCUMENT and the VAGUENESS OF ITS BOUNDARIES.

[sigsfried]

Why does the law on handling of radioactive waste need to be understood by anyone other than technical specialists? That being accepted there is little reason to simplify the law when all you can do is risk failing to adequately account for some edge case either creating an unacceptable risk or making the costs harsher than need be.

[txwatson]

First of all, [STA-CITE]>Edit 9:55: CLARIFICATIONS BASED ON CONFUSION THAT HAS OCCURRED: (1.) I am not arguing that a shorter legal code is by definition easy to understand. I am not arguing that the average High School student should be able to achieve a lawyer's level of expertise in any given aspect. I'm defending the memorization criterion as a way to limit the total length and vagueness of a set of laws. [END-CITE]You either didn't read that part, or you really massively underestimate the length of a document that a person can memorize. Secondly, the correct handling of radioactive waste doesn't sound to me like a legislative issue. It sounds like a professional issue. All the law has to say is something to the effect of "Don't put people at risk," and the correct following of that law would be intrinsically defined by the realities of the properties of radioactive waste. In fact, specific procedural legislation for tasks that are defined by physical realities is a terrible idea, because it legally prohibits the application of changes in understanding of the science.

[majinspy]

Taken as a whole, "The Law" is a labyrinthine nightmare. On the whole, though, each industry adapts and has time to do so. I work in trucking and have had to learn the regulations. They aren't hard in themselves, but the same level of understanding multiplied by EVERY sector of the economy would be overwhelming. Luckily, this is never required of anyone. No one person will ever need to know US maritime law, the Seattle laws regarding lumber harvesting, and New York State's laws regarding pension fund management. The law and its relationship to a person are just one more thing they learn in due course of becoming prepared for an occupation. Furthermore, in the age of the internet, good legal primers are abundant. If you want to become a landlord or, conversely, rent a piece of property, you can easily find resources 24/7 breaking down rights, responsibilities, and legal remedies written in accessible language. What about the god-awful tax code? Granted people with large incomes / holdings / or other complexities often have to hire an accountant. These people / organizations have the money to do so. It is the cost of doing business. "Regular" people though, can easily file taxes online. I've done it myself for 3 years. Even if I couldn't figure it out, there are numerous services who will prepare my taxes for very little money. I'm not arguing that your necessarily wrong, I'm arguing that we've arrived. I honestly believe that a high school graduate could, with moderate study over a month, learn any one particular area of law as it pertains to their jobs.

[txwatson]

I cited a few times in this thread that vehicle regulation is one of the areas that looks to me like it's close to, or already meeting, the terms of this test. And you're absolutely right -- nobody's going to need the whole law. But there are big chunks of the law in other fields that are not as straightforward as the laws surrounding trucking or lumber harvesting. Another thing I've mentioned a few times is that professionals have said we literally don't know how many laws there are in the US Tax Code. I've also pointed to patent and copyright as areas that are too complex. In fact, they're both so complex that they're often successfully used to bring suit against people who are doing entirely legal things -- which allows companies with lots of money to illegally manipulate the behavior of companies or individuals with little to no money. It sounds like you've had great experiences with a relatively functional side of the US legal system, and I'm thrilled that that's the case for you. I would like to see it be the case for everyone.

[connaissezlesroses]

From what I've read in this post, this is a build-your-own society hypothetical not relevant to the current state because the U.S. wouldn't be open to deconstructing existing legal infrastructure. I think your point about making the legal system comprehensible to the every-person is an interesting concept, but it's Utopian. I'd like to argue that this isn't a possibility because of the nature of humanity. We'd first have to look at how the nation was founded and who was in power to create the basic infrastructure that would eventually build to a complex infrastructure. We'd have to see their influences and their motivations in creating this new state. I think corruption will always play a huge part in the creation of nations because humans are more apt to look after themselves first in a spirit of survival and pleasure seeking, and then look at community interests as an afterthought. Also, because creating a legal system is such a complex and long-term project, we'd have to look at how it would be possible to build a comprehensible and comprehensive legal system without the idiosyncrasies and terrible writing it contains. I don't think your argument is plausible because I think there's a very small chance that the individuals building the system will be capable of meeting the qualifications you outline.

[txwatson]

I'm not arguing that this is something we **can** implement, here, now. If I were, this post would be way, way longer and include a hell of a lot more suggestions. I'm arguing that if we were to write a legal system from scratch, this should be one of the limiting factors we keep in mind. You're right that there's good reason the United States was founded the way it was, and grew the way it did. You're right that we don't have good mechanisms for fighting corruption, and I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions for mechanisms like that, of which I'm as confident as I am in the ideas I've written in this post so far. But that all only speaks to the initial point: The system we have now is fucked up. There is room for improvement. There are versions of a legal system that would be better than the one we have. I'm arguing that a quality that would be a huge plus for that kind of system is the quality of being within the scope of perception of the average citizen.

[connaissezlesroses]

Do you have an example of a simplified legal system that functions to better improve the lives of it's citizens? Let's say, hypothetically, a society is founded with a legal system that a hs student could understand the mechanics of. This doesn't solve the problem of corruption, or the use of language and influence to bend the meaning and implementation of law. It just makes it easier for the hs student to get mad when they see injustice. It doesn't help them fight the higher up corruption. Ultimately, your point is defeated if corruption exists to nullify the benefits of comprehension.

[txwatson]

First of all: **I did not say a system that the average high school student could understand or comprehend.** I said memorize. The limitation is about length and vagueness. It's not about reading level or complexity within that space. Secondly: yes, it **would** be **massively** better if it were **easy for the general population to get pissed off.** That's the sort of thing that holds politicians back from radical overreach. That's the sort of thing that **DOES** help them fight corruption. Thirdly: No, I don't have any examples. This is hypothetical. As to your last sentence: I would amend -- "Ultimately, your point is defeated if corruption exists **in sufficient quantity** to nullify the benefits of **comprehensibility.**" Corruption will always exist in some quantity. Revolution will always exist in some quantity. So will greed, and good will, and religion, and sexuality, and interest in the interpretation of the shapes of clouds. These things influence civilization to varying degrees based on a huge variety of factors, and I genuinely believe that making it easier to envision the scope of the law will make it easier for the people to demand fair treatment under it.

[Kirkaine]

[STA-CITE]>any given category of regulation by profession (medical [END-CITE]How the hell is the average high schooler supposed to understand the regulations that apply to doctors when there isn't a goddamn chance that the average high schooler knows how to be a doctor in the first place?

[txwatson]

Because there's a difference between learning and understanding the language of laws governing a thing, and understanding the mechanics of the practice itself? Like, I could reasonably understand a law that says "Doctors are liable for harm that results from a discernible mistake in surgery" without knowing how to perform surgery.

[Kirkaine]

Yet a law written like that is open to enough interpretation (discernible? To who?) to drive several semi-trailers through the gates. That just leads to huge inefficiency when all these aspects need to be fought over in court every time. The second amendment is nice and simple in its wording, look at how vicious court battles over it are.

[txwatson]

The second amendment is not even a little bit simple in its wording, and my point is not that *every* easy-to-memorize system of laws would work, it's that we'd be better off if we developed one that worked. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I have bones to pick with the common law system, but some method of convergence on interpretation based on the history of trials would be a pretty good way to rough out the edges. More importantly, an ideal system would result in most of the cases being decided by trial with a judge and/or jury, meaning there's an application of human common sense and good faith interpretation. (I would also tweak the system of rules for juries, but that's another conversation entirely.) One of the big problems now is that the majority of decisions made by people that are influenced by what is and isn't legal are made in terms not of whether they think it's legal, but whether they can afford the lawsuit. (Illegal but affordable? Do it. Legal but will cost me my life savings? Nope.) Of the cases that don't end somewhere before they begin, about 97% are settled by plea bargain -- which gets its teeth from mandatory minimum sentencing, meaning decent people with good cases can't rely on a judge's common sense willingness to say "Yeah that was illegal but you're obviously not a danger so I sentence you to time served plus three hours of community service."

[NeilZod]

But this is where your argument falls down. You can create a simple rule that becomes complex when he change the facts. A discernable mistake in elective, cosmetic surgery is much different from an emergency room patient suffering from injuries to many major systems - should the surgeon have dealt with the increases cranial pressure before stopping the aortic bleeding? Shoot, why didn't the surgeon address the anuerysm of the femoral artery? It is really easy to write a simple rule, but if that simple rule covers all contingencies, it probably isn't a fair rule. Just sticking with medicine, dermatologists make different mistakes than obstetricians who make different mistakes than emergency-room cardiothoracic surgeons. Judging any of this at the level of what high schoolers can memorize is dumbing down professionals without gaining anything. High schoolers aren't qualified to do anything other than to take the first step toward a deeper understanding.

[windowtothesoul]

I entirely agree that certain parts are unnecessarily complex and complicated. I don't think you'll find many people who disagree that the American legal system could be slimmed down substantially. I'll make two quick points with the idea of persuading you that, while it should be simplified, a substantial degree of complexity is necessary for certain aspects to function. First, take criminal law. Let's assume that laws are created on the premise that they outlaw an action that is morally bad. That sounds fine and dandy at first, but who defines what is morally bad? Some things are clear cut - hitting a small child would be morally bad. But what if hitting them prevented some greater harm? Going down this train of logic will ultimately lead to a purely utilitarian theory on the legal system. That isn't to say that it would be better or worse than our's currently, but given the immense literature on utilitarianism I doubt any high schooler could reasonably be expected to memorize it. Second, let's look at regulation by profession, specifically bank regulation. If you haven't heard of Dodd-Frank, well, lucky you. It's a 800-odd page legislative titan. I would hardly believe it couldn't be slimmed down some, yet a lot of it is necessary for a functional judicial system to determine what is and is not legal. Take the Volcker rule and prop. trading. That's explicitly illegal now (well, kind of... not yet). There isn't a huge moral justification to regulations such as these other than 'they increase risk and excessive risk is bad'. But who defines what excessive risk is? If you have a probability of default of 50% is that bad? Is 15% acceptable? What about 5%? Even better, what about 4.99999% versus 5%? Some of these things just ultimately need someone saying "Enough! We'll agree on 5% or we will agree to disagree." and to codify it. However, that codification, even if is only one line applied to hundreds of laws, would be immense. In short, my two points were: 1. We could create a system that simply pointed to morally impermissible actions as illegal, but that would lead to large discrepancies (or would need have some other system to define what is morally impermissible, out of scope of a high schooler's memory). 2. In order to eliminate discrepancies, the system needs to codify at least some specific instances, and by doing such for an immense number of actions we go beyond, well, *any* one person's memory.

[txwatson]

∆ I'm giving you a delta btw because thinking about it your post has made it obvious to me that the list of subcategories would be bigger than I initially anticipated, and might itself be a pretty significant feat of memorization. But I still think it should be within the scope of countability and basically anyone should be aware of all the sets of laws that they need to worry about.

[windowtothesoul]

Entirely agreed there and it might even be possible for a "daily" set of laws covering 90% of one's common actions. But it'd be the 10% that would cause massive headaches. Thanks!

[txwatson]

I think that remaining 10 percent could be reasonably isolated into meaningful subcategories, each of which could be, themselves, more-or-less to a layperson who was struck by the impulse to study it. This would mean the law code would still be massive, but systematically the territory of the law would be clear.

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[txwatson]

In response to your first point, I'm not necessarily arguing for a morally justifiable legal system. (I mean, I would hope that it were, but the question "Is x government morally defensible?" is beyond the scope of this post.) This system doesn't have to be rooted in a stated moral theory. It just has to be rooted in a stated system of practice and response. In response to your second point, you're doing that thing I asked people not to do in my post: appealing to the existence of laws. The economy is a manifestation of a set of laws; if that set of laws were simpler from the very beginning, I believe you would be able to avoid the need for 800-page legal tomes. The main mechanism of that, I think, would be subdivision. Instead of saying "These are the finance laws," you'd say "These are the stock and investment laws" and "these are the savings-bank laws." And I know those two groups are intertwined right now. Under my legal shift, they wouldn't be. I did already concede that for economic law it would have to be global to have the simplifying effect I'm hoping for.

[realeyes_realize_]

First of all, why do you think the legal system is so complex? Also do you know the difference between statutory and case law and the functions of each?

[txwatson]

I do, and I have my bones to pick with case law and the common law system, but it's still the case that statutory law is in many cases extremely complicated, and I believe that that's generally to the disadvantage of the public and the civilization.

[realeyes_realize_]

Why do you think it's complicated? In any case, the legal system is simply an outgrowth of the effect of human behavior's interaction with the predominate ethics and morals of the time. It's complex because human behavior is complex as so far as intent, action, and consequence are concerned. For example, some one who steals should be punished, yes I believe everyone can agree on that. But to what extent? Should the punishment be the same for someone who steals for profit as opposed to someone that steals food because they are starving and had no recourse? Those two don't seem to be the same crime, even though the actions were the same.

[txwatson]

I'm not interested in arguing here what constitutes a moral vs. an immoral government. I'm saying regardless of the moral principles implicit in a government, the people under its governance would be better served by it if its terms were systematically within a relatively comprehensible scope.

[infected_goat]

One needs only to look on reddit discussing rape to see why it is never that simple. Rape is sex without consent. Does that adequately define rape? What if the victim consented like the case in California where the woman thought it was her husband? Okay! Easy enough to plug that hole, rape is sex without consent AND without false pretense. Except what do you mean by false pretense? What if you tell someone you're a fighter pilot, later they find out you lied, is they rape? Sounds silly... Okay ... Let's plug that hole too (pun not intended) There's always going to be a hole, there are 350 million Americans. There will always be that one case that forces more clarification more description.

[txwatson]

Hypothetically, let's say we were to institute some kind of system whereby, say, professionals involved in the study of the laws debate the details of individual cases before an impartial professional with a great deal of experience in the law, possibly with a group of peers from the community who could help by offering guidance of the values of the overall civilization?

[infected_goat]

Law, is about the finality of dispute, everything else is dressing. We have lawyers, judges, appeals judges Supreme Court judges already, and we already view cases on a case by case basis, with mitigating and aggravating circumstances taken into account. But laws need to be reasonably narrow, broad oversimplified laws lead to vast unequal treatment and interpretation. It simply won't work, just imagine the mess of any interstate crimes (even more confusing than it already is)

[txwatson]

You're not actually making a defense of your point -- you're just asserting I'm wrong, then pointing out that extremely complicated legal systems cause problems, which is exactly my point in the first place.

[infected_goat]

No, I'm pointing out extremely simple legal systems cause problems, the complications arise because of attempts to patch up the holes in "simple" legal ideas.

[txwatson]

You know I didn't say "extremely simple," right? I'm not advocating the minimization of all laws to the smallest possible form. I literally say in the original post, "I'm not a fan of extreme simplification." My point is that a massively over-complicated system is *also* bad, and that it would be a good idea to limit the complexity of any given coherent subsection of the law to be within the scope of an average citizen's ability to read and memorize.

[infected_goat]

Honest questions: what type laws are you talking about? Can you give a specific example? And why do you think it isn't already the way you dream it to be?

[txwatson]

Professionals in the field have said that we literally do not know how many laws there are in the US tax code. Using the overwhelming ambiguity of copyright law, major media companies frequently successfully bring lawsuits against individuals or small companies who are using media entirely within their rights, and sometimes win due to superior legal force, and vastly more often win by concession because small organizations can't afford to win a copyright battle against large organizations. Patent trolls successfully exploit the complexity and vagueness of patent laws to patent technologies that already exist and sue the companies already successfully using them. It is literally a felony to violate the terms of service on a website, even if the thing you are doing is otherwise completely legal. The overwhelming body of American law is in case law -- the decisions of judges in millions of cases throughout US history -- which is a field that Americans largely don't have access to, and definitely cannot comprehensively learn. Even lawyers don't comprehensively learn case law. They do fresh research in any case where they don't already know where to look. That's part of the reason it's worth hiring a good lawyer or a big firm -- knowing obscure precedent can win an otherwise obviously lost case.

[infected_goat]

You realize it's complex to reduce vagueness? If a company hires a hundred lawyers you're going to have a bad time, that simple solution you're looking for just doesn't exist I'm afraid.

[NeilZod]

Your patent and copyright examples are premised on the fact that the US system does not require the loser to pay the the other side's costs. It has nothing to do with the complexity of laws. To the extent that people have been able to obtain patents on no patentable subject matter, recent Supreme Court cases have been killing patent trolls.

[EvilNalu]

There are two competing forms of simplicity: brevity and clarity. Often language is a tradeoff between the two. We could write a law that is very easy to memorize, such as: [STA-CITE]>Thou shalt not kill. [END-CITE]This law does great on the brevity scale: only four words! We might even say that the meaning seems clear when we write it. But them we will start applying it to situations and we start to realize it does terribly on the clarity scale: what if I killed someone who was about to kill me? What if I negligently dropped a hammer while building a skyscraper and it fell and killed someone? What if I'm driving normally and someone jumps in front of my car? Which one (if any) violates our law and which doesn't? If they all do - is it fair that they do? Is this a law that we want? So we decide we need a couple of categories and we need to make them a little more clearly defined: [STA-CITE]>Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice. Murder and manslaughter are justifiable when committed by a person while resisting an attempt to murder or to do some great bodily injury upon any person. [END-CITE]Now we are really hurting on the brevity scale: we are up to about 50 words - over ten times our last law! However, we have made significant gains in clarity: we can now tell that our first scenario is justifiable, our second scenario looks like manslaughter, and our third scenario is maybe still unclear (what's "unlawful" mean?). This is the story of voluminous codes: as we move forward in applying laws that we've written to what happens in the world, we notice many problematic areas of uncertainty. Cases crop up where we are not sure whether a word or phrase in our law means that this specific conduct was prohibited. Writing very comprehensive laws helps us to cover more potential situations and gives more guidance to people trying to stay within the limits of the law. I could replace [OSHA regulations](https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owasrch.search_form?p_doc_type=STANDARDS&p_toc_level=1&p_keyvalue=1910) so voluminous that it would be difficult to memorize the table of contents with a single "Thou shalt not expose workers to unsafe conditions." We could get a highschooler to memorize it but if we were running a construction business we couldn't get a lawyer to tell us what precautions our company had to take at a job site. The way it is now we can't get a highschooler to memorize it but we can get a lawyer to tell us what we need to do at our job site. I'm not defending all our current laws and I'm not saying that there isn't significant room for improvement. But it is very important to note that you seem to be pushing one form of simplicity - brevity - without recognizing that it often comes at the expense of the other form - clarity - which is equally or perhaps even more important when discussing rules that could get you thrown in jail.

[txwatson]

I absolutely agree with you about this distinction -- that's pretty much what I'm going for, actually. My hypothesis is that the upper limit of memorizability as an exceptional but reasonable feat would make a good rule-of-thumb balance between brevity and clarity

[EvilNalu]

But why? Is there any good reason why that would be the case? Since we have the capability to write things down and refer to them later, shouldn't we want to increase clarity? As a lawyer and a significant believer that our criminal laws are in a severe state of overreach, I still think that the larger problem is vague laws, not too many or too confusing laws. When overzealous prosecutors bring questionable cases, it is almost never the case that they are making use of arcane laws that the defendant has never heard of. It is usually the case that they are applying existing laws to fact scenarios that the actors did not believe to be criminal. This problem is only made worse when we trade clarity for brevity. I had the good fortune to acquire a free copy of the book [Three Felonies A Day](http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229) which I think is very much in the spirit of our discussion. If you have not already, I suggest that you read it, or at least some of it. It includes many case studies on malicious or overreaching prosecutions. I think you will notice that usually it is a vague bribery, racketeering, fraud, or similar statute that is used. These are not hidden and arcane, they are known to everyone, but they are so broad and vague that their contours are not easily defined and it is easy to come up with plausible arguments that innocent conduct falls within their ambit. I suggest to you that this is the much larger problem and we should not be so eager to trade clarity for brevity.

[txwatson]

My feeling about this is that a more approachable legal code would invite more community engagement with it. If any given individual doesn't look at the law and think "This is an insurmountably huge and incomprehensible thing, and I could not make even a symbolic effort at approaching an understanding of my relationship to it," I think the people would tend to be more informed and engaged self-advocates. But to the point of the problem you're describing: I think the core of that issue would not be solved by my proposal, but that it's an issue of a different kind of reform. In my hypothetical overhaul of the legal system, I think the rule of thumb I'm proposing would be compatible with reforms that address that problem, but it is not necessarily, itself, that solution. The book is on my Amazon wishlist. Thank you for the recommendation!

[DerpyGrooves]

Honestly, apart from certain very general laws, people only are really required to be knowledgable of the laws they work with on a day to day basis. Like, for example, for legal reasons at my workplace, we're required to wash our tools in a very specific way to prevent the transmission of disease (food service). Obviously, the general public wouldn't be knowledgable of how exactly such a process works, but we literally do it every day. This is how most laws work. They're completely arcane to all except those tasked with writing, interpreting and enforcing them- and those that they directly affect, and that's okay. Comprehension is important only insofar as it allows the law to be interpreted and enforced in a reasonable, consistent way.

[txwatson]

Right -- exactly. That's why I brought up categorization. If you work in food service, you should be able to fully learn the set of laws that govern professional food service. If you're a mechanic, you should be able to learn all the laws about motor vehicle maintenance. If you're an accountant, you should be able to learn all the laws in the tax code. And so on. The problem is that we are affected by collections of laws that directly relate to the way we interact with things in our daily lives, in ways that are beyond our understanding. Did you know it's literally a felony to violate a website's terms of service? (I assume you do, since you're on Reddit.) Artists mostly don't understand copyright law. Tax professionals have openly said that nobody knows how many tax laws there are. Traffic law is a good example of this, I think. idk about where you live, but in my state (NH) you get a booklet that literally has all the road laws in it when you're in drivers ed. The assumption is that if you do the thing (like driving) you know all the laws about doing it. But that's usually not true -- it's usually not even possible.

[klw]

[STA-CITE]> Did you know it's literally a felony to violate a website's terms of service? [END-CITE]The JSTOR case never went anywhere because Aaron unfortunately committed suicide. There was an effort to reform the CFAA in the form of Aaron's Law, which would return breach of contract cases currently under the CFAA to the appropriate realm, which is civil contract law. Unfortunately this legislation is currently locked up due to a disagreement between the Congresswoman in charge of the legislation and others in Congress. However, none of this goes to the point you make in your CMV, which is that the law is needlessly complex. The fact that the CFAA is a bad law as it is currently written wouldn't make it less of a bad law if it were written in plain English that could be reasonably understood and regurgitated by any HS graduate. It is formed on fundamental assumptions that are bad, and then interpreted on the extreme end of those bad assumptions.

[txwatson]

...you know Aaron Swartz's case isn't the only one under which that law has ever come up? The CFAA is very long. It, on its own, would fail the criterion of my proposal. It would be possible to write shorter laws that were also bad. But it would not be possible to recreate the CFAA in a form that is **only a part of** a set of laws governing criminal behavior that was within the scope of a HS student to memorize.

[klw]

[STA-CITE]> ...you know Aaron Swartz's case isn't the only one under which that law has ever come up? [END-CITE]I do. There was that case where a woman made up a person to bully one of her children's classmates and created an account on MySpace (or Facebook?) in order to carry out her scheme. However, in that case, iirc, the breaking of the TOS was itself only considered a misdemeanor and advanced to felony status because the TOS violation was in furtherance of other criminal offenses. [STA-CITE]>But it would not be possible to recreate the CFAA in a form that is only a part of a set of laws governing criminal behavior that was within the scope of a HS student to memorize. [END-CITE]You've failed elsewhere in this thread to prove that memorization is indicative of anything but the ability to memorize things. You need to stop using that as a measure of comprehensibility, because it undermines your entire argument. I've memorized songs written in foreign languages that I do not know. Doesn't mean I understand them. I just like the way they sound.

[txwatson]

[STA-CITE]>You need to stop using that as a measure of comprehensibility [END-CITE]**I AM NOT DOING THAT.** Memorizability is a limitation on **LENGTH** and **VAGUENESS OF BOUNDARIES.** I am offering the **pragmatic argument** that a well-crafted **shorter, more clearly delineated legal code** would better serve the citizens under a government than a legal code that **extends to a length that defies the possibility of memorization.** The average American high school graduate would not be capable of the feat of memorizing the text of all criminal offenses.

[klw]

OK. But this doesn't address the fact that short, memorizable laws can still be *bad* laws. Say, for instance, Honest Services Fraud. It's 28 words in Title 18 of the US Code. [STA-CITE]>For the purposes of this chapter, the term *scheme* or *artifice to defraud* includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services. [END-CITE]The **Three Felonies a Day** guy wrote: [STA-CITE]>...after the Supreme Court declined to hear an “honest services” case in February 2009, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a rare dissent to his colleagues’ refusal to review the conviction. In this dissent, Scalia wrote that the law has been used to criminalize a “staggeringly broad swath of behavior,” and if the 28-word statute “is taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion, presumably the statute also renders criminal…a salaried employee’s phoning in sick to go to a ball game.” This admonition has led the high court to accept three cases that challenge the scope of the “honest services” statute in the current term. [END-CITE]This directly contradicts your point that shorter is necessarily better. All I'm trying to say is that a law should be as long as needs to be, and that bad laws should face challenges in the courts. Just *because* a law is short does not make it a good and reasonable law. As for reducing the number of laws a person is subject to, I think that the real problem is the concept that ignorance is not justification for breaking the law. There are legal concepts (mistake of law, which is not commonly accepted, and mistake of fact, which is more commonly used) that can address this very issue with laws that have no "guilty mind" component.

[txwatson]

I didn't say that shorter laws are necessarily better. My point is that on balance a system that's within the scope of average human observability will work better than a system that isn't. As far as ignorance/justification, yeah, that's one of the big problems. I really think, though, that it's not reasonable to try and construct a system that has mechanisms for letting people off based on whether they knew something was illegal.

[klw]

[STA-CITE]>My point is that on balance a system that's within the scope of average human observability will work better than a system that isn't. [END-CITE]Why can't searchability and availability be a meaningful alternative? I mean, otherwise you'd have to get rid of most laws, and I don't think you've made a compelling case that most laws aren't justified.

[txwatson]

Nobody here has made a compelling case that most laws **are** justified, and the structure of debate on this subreddit puts the burden of proof on you, not me. Searchability and availability would be great things, and I think improving them would be good solutions to some of the problems within the American legal system. But I don't think either or both of them can match the value of the ability of citizens to fully envision the scope of the law.

[ghostmcspiritwolf]

many laws regulate things that are simply far too complex to simplify to that level. It generally takes an undergraduate college level education at minimum to understand something like international financial markets and to then effectively regulate them. Laws have to be made with a working knowledge of the system and their language will reflect that.

[txwatson]

Those systems are a manifestation of the laws. The complexity of national and international financial markets emerge from people's behavior as it relates to absurdly complicated systems of rules.

[ghostmcspiritwolf]

That's simply not always true. derivatives markets didn't emerge as a reaction to a legal system, they emerged because people realized they could bet on futures and make money off of it. In fact, there *were* no laws regulating them for quite some time.

[txwatson]

Money emerges from a legal system. Money is literally a government-created institution declaring a collection of objects to be of uniform value. You cannot have a money-based economy without government oversight.

[phoenixrawr]

Money can be any form of liquid currency. It just so happens that the money you're familiar with is printed by governments but that isn't inherently true of money. Money inevitably emerges in society with or without a legal system because the only alternative is direct bartering which becomes less and less feasible as society grows.

[txwatson]

There is such a thing as a substance which is understood to have intrinsic value. Gold is an example in many places throughout history. It can be used as a medium of exchange in an abstraction of bartering, in a way that is similar to the use of money. But when it manifests in the form of uniformly crafted objects that are by definition interchangeable with each other, it does so through the mechanism of a legal system. The only possible exception I can think of is cryptocurrency like bitcoin, about which we could have a very interesting but totally irrelevant discussion about whether code is law. But the main take-away is that money has never manifested in a way that was not explicitly within, and built on the context of, a discrete, discernible legal system. Yes, you're right. Bartering becomes unfeasible as society grows. The mechanism by which the increased complexity of society is sustained **is** government. When people in a community collectively agree on sets of rules to all follow (like: all the shiny metal disks stamped with this picture of the emperor's face are interchangeable, but nobody is allowed to forge them without permission) that is governance. That is law. There's no escaping it: literally the difference between money and other media of exchange is that it's regulated by an explicit collective agreement among the group using it -- which is what law is.

[ghostmcspiritwolf]

that's debatably true, but not particularly relevant to my point. The existence of money itself is all that is required for a financial market to emerge, no further legal framework needs to exist.

[txwatson]

That may be hypothetically true, but it has never been the case, and there's no reason that state would ever emerge. A government wouldn't go to the effort of regulating currency if they weren't interested in regulating its use.

[ghostmcspiritwolf]

what regulations, specifically, are you talking about? What aspects of the derivatives market do you think were created by law?

[txwatson]

A derivative is a type of contract. Contracts are governed by contract law. Also: Why are you trying to get me to be specific about a system of laws when my thesis in this argument is "These laws are incomprehensibly complicated and vague?" If you were to agree to my premise, and I were able to institute my changes systematically, **then** it would be possible to coherently cite specific regulations in a meaningful way. Right now, it's not. That's literally the problem I'm addressing.

[ghostmcspiritwolf]

in practice, contract law tends to have very little effect on constraining derivative markets. I'm trying to get you to be specific because I'm trying to make the point that laws aren't complex for the sake of being complex, they're complex because they deal with complex systems. Your point seems to be the opposite: that complex laws create complex systems. I'm looking for specifics because I'm trying to show you where your point of view is weaker. In some situations, complex systems predate the laws governing them, and to make simple laws regarding them is both naive and ineffective.

[txwatson]

Literally complex systems of contract manipulation cannot exist without a legal system backing them up. The complexity of an economic system builds on the stability of the civilization that governs it. But as systems become more complex, they become more vulnerable to exploitation. It's possible I'm wrong about it being possible to write a set of finance laws that are memorizable by a HS student (but I'm not convinced of that) -- but it is definitely the case that the overwhelming majority of finance law right now is a set of elaborate constructions of detailed corruptions and meager patches that could be fully trimmed off without doing any harm to any part of the economic system apart from overwhelmingly large networks of financial expoloitation.

[txwatson]

2nd reply: I will grant that changing the US laws would not change international laws, and the systems of treaties necessary to interface with other countries' economies would be complex in proportion to the complexities of those countries' economic law. So, you get a delta for that point. ∆ I do think that the actual practice of economics would become drastically simpler if the law were simpler internationally (in ways that I respect would still be complicated) but I agree with the point you didn't necessarily actually make that reforming all the countries' economic legal systems to be simpler in compatible ways at the same time is a way bigger implausibility than reforming just one country's economic law in a way that is self-consistent.

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