law and philosophy

[cellio]

I sit on a board of trustees and was recently added to the bylaws committee. (Finally somebody listened to me when I said "I write precise technical specifications for a living and I'd like to help".) There are some changes we need to make this year, so the committee was charged with looking at everything. As long as we have to call a membership vote on bylaws changes anyway, the theory goes, we may as well try to address anything else that's posing problems.

I am in my element. :-) But it turns out that there are some "me against everybody else" differences in philosophy, so it's been educational all around. For example:

Me: This "examples" passage is just advice, not law. It doesn't belong.
Them: It's good advice.
Me: There should be no unnecessary words in law. This half-page doesn't accomplish anything.
Them: It's not like the difference between 15 pages and 14 is really going to matter.
Me: !!!

They explained that the intent of the actual law might not be clear; I said if not then we needed to clarify the law. They said people might still need examples; I said we were free to provide supplementary documents if anybody thought it was necessary. (Federalist papers, anybody?) Fundamentally, I believe that law should contain only what is truly necessary, with the result that it is short enough that we can expect stake-holders to read, comprehend, and remember it, and so that we leave to policy what should be covered by policy.

In the end they conceded the specific point of discussion, but I don't think we have achieved understanding. My point wasn't just to win this particular argument but to bring them around to a different way of thinking. So there is more work to be done here.

Some may remember that back when the principality of AEthelmearc was forming, I was one of the ones on the law committee arguing that our laws ought to fit on on 8.5 x 11" piece of paper in a reasonable font size, too. (For the kingdom I was willing to grant a second sheet of paper.) We lost that one, alas.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Laws should definitely be succinct. Examples are interesting but are a side topic and likely a separate document.

I look at the length of bills being passed in Congress these days and wonder: how long was the Constitution, and how influential was it? Compared to anything they are doing with 1600+ page documents?

It is one of the things I like about the Agile development model: you don't waste months writing horribly detailed specs that will be obsolete several days into development.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The way I handled this for the Zamir bylaws was to include such things as blockquote italics, preceded by the line in bold "Non-normative example". So what we passed were the bylaws but the document that everyone had read going in to the bylaw approval meeting was an annotated version of the bylaws that included non-normative examples.

[cellio]

When we distribute this to the membership for a vote I think it will need to be accompanied by some explanatory notes -- not just examples but why we made certain changes and perhaps, in some cases, what other ideas were considered and rejected. But that's a supplementary document or an annotated version; that's not the bylaws.

Your formatting sounds like a good idea; it's clear about what's what.

[cellio]

Thousand-page (and more) bills are just bizarre. You know there's no way the people voting on them have actually read them! It's pretty clear that that's not actually expected, which makes me sad.

[evil-baron.livejournal.com]

Is it necessary to achieve understanding or agreement? Sometimes you get to have only one...

[evil-baron.livejournal.com]

Do you have a model code to work from? It always helped in other situations.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

And it would be so trivial to hide an unrelated multi-million dollar project in there. Sigh.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Law is not specification, and specification is not law.

I've learned that one the hard way.

[cellio]

True, but I believe similar skills help both. (In particular, I -- and I suspect you too -- seem to be uncannily good at spotting potential exploits and holes. Not all holes should necessarily be plugged, but you should know where they are.)

[cellio]

With agreement, we have the argument every time another case of the same core problem comes up. With understanding we could avoid some of that.

In this go-round there was only one egregious case and it's dealt with, but there will be future changes and I will not always be on the committee.

[sethg]

The alternative to a thousand-page bill is often a ten-page bill whose precise implementation depends on a thousand pages of executive-branch regulations.

Also, generally speaking, when a thousand-page bill is up before Congress, it’s the result of months of negotiations; it’s not like every page is a complete surprise to the people who will vote on it three days later.

[(Anonymous)]

I chaired a committee to revise our church constitution in 2009. Unsurprisingly, it took much longer than it should have. When we finally copied the revision for members to review, question, and put to a vote, I added a single page stapled to the top of the document entitled "The Member's Guide to the Revised Constitution, or What Have You Been Doing All This Time?" (I had some snarkier subtitles, but I believe Bob nixed them.)

Basically, I just brought to attention where changes had been made and the gist of why/what had changed. I know that most people won't sit and re-read an entire constitution, but I figured that the least a member could do was to read a single sheet of paper. I got a lot of positive feedback about it as well.

Also, I believe that I footnoted all of the changes in the document. That was a tremendous amount of work, but at least it allowed members to see the changes without needing to refer to the outgoing version and it added transparency to the process. Because we also vote on revisions, I felt it was very important for members to be well-informed (or at least as well-informed as I could make them without sitting down and reading to them!).

--Pamela

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Enabling legislation: The State Board of Expectoration Abatement shall hereby be empowered to control public spitting by appropriate regulation, and shall establish such means of enforcement as they shall deem necessary.

Good Law: Whosoever shall spit into the wind on a Thursday shall be fined not less than 3 farthings of silver and 11 peppercorns.

Bad Law: No one should spit into the wind on a Thursday.

Redundant Law: The Podunksville Town Council, in agreement with the State Board, rules that people shouldn't spit into the wind on Thursdays in Podunksville.

Non-law: People should think about spitting, which is sometimes rather rude.

In the SCA, the amount of redundant law, bad law, and non-law, and the lack of understanding of the utility of enabling legislation, is all pretty amazing. I can't imagine we're unique in that.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

Laws which are short do not say things which are specific enough to be enforced usually. Synagogue by-laws usually have a lot more: this is how things shall be done the kinds of laws than the ennumeration of punishments baron_steffan is talking about.

I've heard many times the: 10 commandments/constitution are short compared to this year's federal budget which is long (and is law, though not in the sense I think you mean). To work well and be specific, many words are needed. If there are too few words, too much is left up to interpretation, which varies.

[cellio]

Agreed, particularly about the value and under-utilization of enabling legislation. If there are sufficient checks on the system (or if the matter is unimportant enough), this is sufficient.

(Love your examples, by the way. :-) )

[cellio]

Sometimes you don't need to get specific in law. Our bylaws currently say that the board meets on the fourth Thursday of every month. This has actually never been the case during my time in this congregation -- we usually, but not exclusively, meet on third Thursdays. But instead of changing it to third Thursdays, we changed it to "monthly" and empowered the president to set the schedule. (A meeting can also be cancelled if there is an insufficient agenda.)

Another case: any situation that has to be approved by the board anyway can be left vague. The bylaws don't need to spell out the rules for how sisterhood and brotherhood will elect their chairs given that the choice has to be approved, for instance. On the other hand, the rules for how to amend the bylaws must be specific and unambiguous, because there is no "higher authority" (so to speak).

So I guess what I'm saying is: sometimes leaving things up to interpretation is a good thing IMO. It allows you to react to situations instead of waiting for the next annual meeting to change the bylaws to allow whatever it was you really needed to do six months ago.