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I am of the opposite view; if the people do not know and understand the rules, then then they cannot be expected to abide by them. There are so many criminal, civil, and regulatory laws that the people could not possibly be expected to know, that the system is unfair. Lawyers will often say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that is a manifestly unreasonable doctrine when even the regulators, legislators, and prosecutors have no idea of how many laws there are, and what is illegal.

My view is that there should be two classes in grade 10; one on criminal law, and one on civil, and the laws should never be more complex or more numerous than can be explained to a 15 year-old in those two semesters.

I think most people would agree that using a firearm is shooting it, but that problem would easily be solved by changing the word to "discharging" it.

So pointing a loaded pistol at a clerk while robbing a store is then not using the firearm?

No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had looked over the iron sights.

note: I do not own a firearm

So assault...using a firearm.

I believe that most (all?) laws refer to such behavior as assault 'with a weapon' or 'with a firearm'. Google auto-corrects 'assault using a firearm' to 'assault with a firearm'.

What if you take your rifle and use it to beat someone upside the head? Is that using it?

The case in question concerned someone who used the firearm to exchange it for drugs. Is that "use"? The Court said yes, with dissenters.

The point is that these sorts of questions crop up all the time even with well-drafted rules and regulations. So courts have decisions...and they write them down. So legislators make the statutes more detailed...and they write them down. So administrators make regulations and interpretations...and they write them down. The only way to cut it to "100 pages" is to stop writing things down, which leads to law that is arbitrary and inequitable.

Those are mostly cases of the courts trying to interpret laws in creative ways to reach conclusions they like. Cases like Bond and Yates prove that many prosecutors are willing to stretch laws, and get many courts to agree with those broad interpretations of the law.[1][2] My view is that they should read the laws more strictly.

Do you expect the average citizen to have read all the civil and criminal laws of your state and country, in addition to all the opinions by appelate courts? If the answer to that is no, then you should not expect that citizen to abide by a body of law of which they are unaware. You might as well write the laws in secret and hide them from the people, because the current volume of law is equivalent to obfuscation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States

You'd still be using the firearm, though. You wouldn't have shot it, but you used the threat of shooting it.

Would saying you'd go home, and come back with your firearm still be using it? What about threatening to go buy a firearm? How about saying you once went to a shooting range and shot a firearm? Telling a story about going hunting with a gun? Talking about an episode of "How it's Made" where they made a firearm?

Your comment is ridiculous to the point of lunacy. And it's far too far removed from the subject matter for you to try to claim some argument ad absurdum crap. The fact of the matter is that, in that situation, you still had the gun pointed in someone's face.

It's complex because there are many, many edge cases in laws. And not all of them are codified, but many are discovered after the fact, and so court rulings become part of the law.

The law recognizes brandishing as a type of offense.

I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level.

This is not new territory. They're building a master planned community (with what you might consider an HOA on steroids), and based on their requirements, I think they going to do an incredible job compared to your average real estate developer.

Local zoning ordinances don't fit in 100 pages. The huge body of real estate law that is necessary to give force to restricted deeds doesn't fit in 100 pages.

Maybe they mean their 100 pages looks something like "The Law of the City of Newcity is identical to the Law of Dallas, with the following changes:"? Well, the law of Dallas does not fit in 100 pages.

Law is complicated because we have built a complicated society. This cannot be willed away by talking about 100 pages.

I don't disagree, but HN can merely add to existing law with their self-built city; they're not going to be able to negate existing country/state/province law, so why would they need to fit all law within 100 pages?

Find the locality that already meets your needs closest, iterate from there.

I wonder if it would be feasible to train a neural network on a large corpus of test cases where legality/illegality have already been defined, then release this neural network to the public. Sure, the process will be opaque, but it will be consistent between different users, and answers can be sought almost immediately with little to no costs. In many cases, an immediate straight up no is more valuable than a maybe suspended over months or years.

Until someone finds an edge-case or a way to reverse engineer it.

http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

It could be 100 pages if you start from scratch with a permissive development plan... (from a city standpoint).

Issues such as criminal law, state and federal taxation, etc are outside the purvue of this discussion (and of the 100 page limit) since YCR is speaking of a _city_, likely within the US.

Put a draft up on github and see it fork away!