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

[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.

[(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