Tension Between Simple and Complex Laws

Posted on September 24, 2009
Filed Under Sideblog | 6 Comments

The tension between simple and complex laws. My view is the that it’s ultimately unjust to have laws people can’t understand. If you need a dedicated law department to know how to act then effectively you punish the average person and provide huge costs on small business. That said sometimes complexity arises because of the situations you wish to avoid.

Related posts:

  1. Libertarianism and Laws
  2. The Laws of the Laws of Thought
  3. Laws & Facts
  4. Newton’s Own Laws
  5. Am I a Physicalist?
  6. Mind and Matter: the three non-reductionist alternatives

Comments

6 Responses to “Tension Between Simple and Complex Laws”

I think complexity derives from the desire to create distinct classes. Lawyer-speak or Doctor-speak were created so that they would have their own language that the average person would not understand.

Wall Street bankers developed complex investment vehicles, such as mortgage backed securities (MBS) in order to help hide the fact that they were taking huge risks.

Congressional bills often are hundreds (or in the case of the health care bill, thousands) of pages long, partially to hide many of the intricate kickbacks and payoffs to their lobby constituents.

Perhaps we need to get back to the day when a contract meant two people shaking hands in agreement. Or at least where we can keep it to a few pages, with no need for lawyers to review every line to ensure nothing can be misconstrued by other lawyers or experts.

(I have nothing against lawyers. There are many that do great work for our society. I just think they have fallen into the same complexity trap that everyone else is).

I don’t mind complex laws so much – what I mind is the impossibility of the legal system resolving a simple patent dispute for less than several million dollars. That leads to getting your way by simple intimidation.

I think that the plaintiffs in all civil actions should be required to fund the other side, up to the amount they spend themselves, and that amount not be refundable except to the degree an award for damages compensates for the cost.

I think the problem is a belief in stasis type solutions. If you are currently on the technocratic side of the fence you need to shift to greater simplicity. Vice versa if you are on the one rule to rule them all side of things. I suspect it is the unification that comes from heading down a given direction that has more fundamental importance than rules themselves.

There really aren’t any ideal tensions that can be maintained. People generally respond to change and this creates a destabilizing playing field. In social systems there are a whole host of good reasons why laws shouldn’t be static in nature or even mildly dynamic – it’s good in theory and pretty terrible in practice.

I’m not sure lawyer speak or doctor speak were designed to keep people out. Rather they were designed to be exact on the sorts of things doctors or lawyers are concerned about that the rest of society doesn’t normally care about. Suddenly after sufficiently linguistic evolution you have an impenetrable jargon. It’s not just doctors and lawyers though. Scientists, mathematicians and football fans all have their own jargons.

The problem in law though is that the laws are supposed to be things that everyone follows which suggests the necessity of comprehension by most people. And I think it’s unarguable that we’re well past that point.

Chris, i agree there’s no ideal answer. Which is why it’s an essential tension. That said though there seems on the face of it for there to be something very Kafkaesque about being subject to laws you can’t understand.

It seems to me, people understand the direction things are headed more so than the specific place where things currently reside. In that sense I would suggest they are much more perceptive of change than detail.

I think that’s true Chris. I think the medical debate down here in the states is illustrative of that. Both foes and fans, even on the extremes, have a pretty good idea where things are going. However my experience is that even people who think they are informed are amazingly ignorant of what the state actually is. (They are also amazingly ignorant about how things are in Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, France and so forth)

Leave a Reply