Using Wikis to Catch Outdated and Bad Laws?

Mick Ohrberg asks: "While listening to NPR this morning, I heard about the ridiculous law, passed in 1675, that orders the arrest of all American Indians entering Boston, and just now, 330 years later, is ready to be repealed. There are a LOT of really outdated and/or inappropriate laws out there; would an 'open' Wiki-style approach to law-making (with appropriate supervision, of course) be able to catch more of these 'bad' laws? Should the law-makers be able to keep track of all these laws, or are the number of laws simply too large for that relatively small group of people to keep track of? The more and more outdated copyright laws also come to mind as an area that could stand some more scrutiny."

Comments

experation date

[AnotherBlackHat]

Just require an experation date on the laws.

Re:experation date

[Sancho]

I can only imagine the nightmare this would cause.

While it would be a good way to keep things in check, it would bog down Congress more than they already are, and allow for riders to get in more easily and with less scrutiny. Just imagine:

Democrat: "Oh, looks like the 'murder is illegal' law is expiring. Better make a new one."

Republican: "What an opportunity! We can add a bill to remove freedom of speech while we're at it! And add addendums such that no court (except the Supreme Court, which is backlogged anyway) can overturn the law! And if the Dems vote against it, we'll claim they're murderers! Win/Win!"

This is not to mention the problems police officers would have with laws which could, at any point in time, be in a state of flux. Imagine the unlawful arrest suits when your local government lets jaywalking laws slip, for example.

Re:experation date

[ebrandsberg]

Congress NEEDS to be bogged down. If by law they have to read and vote on each law at least once very 20 years, then the bad laws will be thrown out so they don't have to read them. The system of laws in this country is now so complex, nobody knows them all, so forcing them to simplify would be of value.

Re:experation date

[Anonymous Coward]

You still end up in a situation where all the legislature would do is vote on old laws. There are way too many laws, and it would consume all of thier time to review each one to find if it was worth keeping the law around. I think the current method where outdated laws are challenged when they are found is better. The one major change I would like to see is the removal of riders. There are very few legitimate reasons for riders to exist and too many unpopular and bad laws are passed simply because they are attached to other packages that are popular or important. .$.

Re:experation date

[WIAKywbfatw]

If by law they have to read and vote on each law at least once very 20 years, then the bad laws will be thrown out so they don't have to read them.

(Bold emphasis added by me.)

Ah, but first you'd have to get the US Congress to pass legislation that made it compulsory for Congressmen to read the all laws that they are voting on, and that's never going to happen. Just as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, Congressmen won't vote to give themselves a more demanding workload.

Most Congressmen will openly admit to not reading the bills that they are passing, which means that bills like the USA PATRIOT Act get passed even though they have sections in them that many Congressmen later confess to finding abhorrent.

(The whole system of attaching riders that have nothing to do with the original bills doesn't help either. At best it's dubious, and at worse it's immoral.)

I've no doubt that a few Congressmen are hard-working and conscientious, but the majority of them seem to have no interest in doing anything other than not rocking the boat whilst they put maximum effort into making sure that they maximise their campaign funds and get re-elected.

Legislated to Oblivion

[Rocketship Underpant]

I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.

The legislative model of democracy is absolutely ridiculous. Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more; legislators spend all their time trying to pass as many laws as possible while spending no time actually reading or understanding these laws. Legislators think it's their job to "do something", and the media portrays a deadlocked Congress as an obstacle to progress. In fact, the opposite is true.

As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.

This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.

Legislatures have made law irrelevant, paradoxical, oppressive, and absurd; and Western democracy is going to fail because of it.

Re:Legislated to Oblivion

[Anonymous Coward]

The legislative model of democracy is absolutely ridiculous.

It's not an intrinsic property of democracy, merely a pitfall many implementations have succumbed to.

I don't think that a wiki in particular would be all that useful, but I do think that geek technologies in general could help democracy greatly, simply because we built tools to cope with massive amounts of communication between disparate groups, while dealing with trolls, spammers, short attention spans, etc.

legislators spend all their time trying to pass as many laws as possible while spending no time actually reading or understanding these laws.

If I were constructing a government today, in the constitution, I'd have a section saying that all laws must have a summary and rationale attached to them, detailing exactly why the law is required, and it would be a crime for somebody to vote for a bill without reading at least the summary and rationale.

Re:Legislated to Oblivion

[Planesdragon]

I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.

Kindly get yourself down to your local law library; your state capitol, local law school, or local community college should have a reasonably up-to-date sample.

You should be able to find the 20+ volumes of the USC, the 20-odd volumes of your local state couterpart to the same, maybe a copy of your town charter, and the 50-odd volumes of legal precedent and casework.

Why all this bulk? Because the nitty gritty of law can be very, very complex, after years and years of arguing as to what the law means in the innumerable situations that come up.

Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more

Law never was about right or wrong. Law is about what acts are illegal, and when your rights trump my rights.

This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.

Conspiracy crimes--which date back to Prohibition, mind you--require an illegal act or an illegal purpose. And if you're a US citizen, there's a rather finite ammount of time that they can hold you before they have to bring you before a jury and convince the jury that their conspiracy case is solid.

You're probably thinking of "terrorism" crimes, which are problematic when it comes to non-military enemy combatants and a bit unsettling when it comes to the investigative powers of our government.

As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.

Actually, the hundreds of thousands of laws across this country have strict priority, with the newest and the highest ones overruling the lower ones. The best example of this is sodomy laws--they're still on the books in the dozen-odd states that passed them, but they're irrelevent unless SCOTUS or the Constitutional Amendment process lets states outlaw sodomy again.

And if you're worried about not always following every law, just remember this: the law is only words on paper. When it comes down to the wire, it's three learned citizens (two lawyers and a judge) arguing a case which gets decided by twelve-sixteen common folk, who can almost ignore legal precedent at will.

it could work..

[Goeland86]

I'd say you'd have to start by creating the wiki first, then try and publicize it to the public, and when enough people read it and think it's a ridicule law you could then lobby our lawmakers to repeal them. This I think would be the best approach, especially if you create online petitions from that community.

Of course, you don't want to have some big corporation that depends on a given law to come in and erase your wiki either, so keeping a history of modifications is in order too.

This might be an efficient way to get rid of stupid IP laws that the crowd on here loathes so ferociously.

Re:expiration date

[wronskyMan]

However if you break traffic rules on most military bases, you can have your base driving privileges revoked, which are enforced by serious people with M-16s.

Colonial America called...

[idonthack]

... and they want their laws back. I heard about the ridiculous law, passed in 1675, that orders the arrest of all American Indians entering Boston, and just now, 330 years later, is ready to be repealed. Has anybody *else* noticed that 1675 is more than 100 years before the United States of America even came into existence? Why is it a problem, if the law was made by a government that doesn't exist anymore?

Re:Here's a big list of them

[mini me]

For the most part, such laws aren't even given any attention.

What about when they decide to start enforcing the silly laws?

Case in point: Here in Ontario you are issued a license plate sticker for snowmobiles. But they aren't very attractive, so for years pretty much everyone was putting custom designed numbers on their snowmobiles instead. While it was technically not legal to do so, it was never enforced. Then all of a sudden a few years back they decided to crack down on it. About a year thereafter they got around to changing the law, but people were charged during that period. So, in conclusion, the same could happen with any law, no matter how silly it is.

Re:The laws ARE open

[thucktyranny]

Maybe the libertarian in you would appreciate the Read the Bills Act.

Fix the cause, not the symptoms

[Nice2Cats]

Stupid old laws are not the real problem but simply a symptom of the archaic American Common Law legal system. There is a good reason why modern legal systems insist that laws are given numbers and written down in books instead of accumulating them as hard to access "Jack Dipdork vs. the City of Jerktown" cases that even the professionals have trouble finding. Unforunately, fixing the cause and not the symptoms is totally unrealistic in a system where Congress is full of lawyers who don't even want tort reform: They realize too well that the real goal of the legal system is to make money for lawyers and prepare their political careers, with justice just a side effect.

Re:New laws more important than old ones

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the system they had in medieval Iceland: Every three years, somebody had to recite their entire legal code. Anything he left out, wasn't a law anymore.