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.

[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.

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

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

[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.