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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

I have a somewhat related idea. For every law now on the books, and every individual paragraph of those laws, I'd like a site where citizens and politicians, under their true names, can log their support or opposition to that clause.

Obsolete clauses, and those that exist only for the narrow interest of just one or a few campaign donors, should then stick out like sore thumbs -- with either no one supporting them, or only obvious stooges (eg paid lobbyists). Those without a certain baseline of continuing support would automatically expire after a certain period. (Clauses wouldn't individually require majority support -- just some support so that some true person is accountable for explaining why such handouts exist/persist.)

The same process could also be applied to bills under consideration.

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Is a system in which a large number of citizens must be intimately aware of the intricacies of a huge and complex set of legal code a well-factored system? Isn't that a bit like the passengers of an airplane instructing the pilot on how to fly?

Under our current system in the U.S., not even the representatives and senators themselves write, let alone read the legislation they're voting on (http://www.govtrackinsider.com/articles/2010-03-24/whowrites...). The lay-person has far more personal challenges to address (e.g. family, career) than educating themselves in legal-speak in order to comprehend legal code itself.[1]

Better, I think to use causes to abstract and simplify the underlying legislation, as I'm attempting to do in http://votereports.org - which is akin to telling the pilot where you want to go, rather than how to fly.

Incidentally, there are a number of sites which enable you to indicate support for bills under consideration, to varying effect, including votereports, lawilike on facebook, visiblevote, opencongress, newballot and certainly others.

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[1] As it is, media and bloggers don't even link to the bills they write about: http://infovegan.com/2010/06/19/bloggers-and-bills/. Personally I take this to be an indication of how little demand for and comprehension of this info on the reader side.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from James Madison, from Federalist Paper #62:

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"

In my opinion, Madison was as correct now as he was then.

That sounds nice and tidy, but it seems hard to fit the requirements of e.g. the EPA or the erstwhile MMS or the CFTC into something coherent enough to be understood by a lay person.

Simplicity and fairness and effectiveness are all in tension with each other.

...akin to telling the pilot where you want to go, rather than how to fly.

The problem with this analogy is that the incentives of the pilot are strongly aligned with yours. If he delivers you to Paris rather than SF, you'll never fly with him again. You probably also have legal remedies against the airline, which if you exercised them would cause the pilot to lose his job.

In contrast, the incentives of lawmakers and bureaucrats are not aligned with those of ordinary citizens. For instance, in the face of budget shortfalls, government should cut the least vital services first, perhaps reducing the salaries of employees. Instead, they tend to cut the most important services first in an effort to increase support for tax hikes. The MTA in NYC is doing this, for example:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/12/13/2009-12-13_mt...

Abstracting and simplifying the underlying legislation assumes the politicians aren't lying to you. That's always a bad assumption, the devil is usually hidden in the details.

In the analogy, you yourself can tell whether you've arrived in Paris, France or Paris, Texas. In politics, you do need someone else to continue to identify whether the bills up for consideration are positive or negative from your perspective, and if you don't have a trustworthy figure doing so, you do end up in a a pickle.

But the key point is: I don't suggest or assume it should be the politicians themselves who tell you where you've ended up and who has brought you there. It's the activists and politicos of the world I look to.

The system wouldn't require many people to read much. Some gadflies, lawyers, and think-tankers would do a deep pass in areas that concern them; a citizen bitten by a specific law would look at that law in detail and register support/disapproval.

Then, the areas of controversy or obscurity would start to stick out in automated/ranked analysis. Activists (of all stripes) would point out areas for a closer look with URLs.

It is a system for calling attention to things, in turn -- not necessarily forcing preemptive review of (or expertise on) everything.

It could also work if the only people who register support/opposition are elected legislators. In this variant, by default, if you've voted for a law, you're marked as supporting all its clauses. A legislator can then go in -- after the fact -- and remove their name from those clauses they don't specifically support. (When replaced, the new seatholder inherits the previous legislators' positions, until they choose to update them.)

If/when a clause has zero supporters -- no one in the current legislature is willing to go on record as sponsoring it -- then it enters a sunset period. If it doesn't get another on-the-record defender in 6 months to a year, it expires.

Thus, every law, when passed, has coverage for every clause -- but then legislator shame and/or turnover leaves the most embarrassingly narrow clauses with fewer and fewer supporters facing more and more negative attention.

Compare it with the "enforcement priority list" for crime concept about midway through this piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/business/economy/04view.ht...

By focusing attention on one egregious clause at a time -- as the 'least sponsored' or 'most opposed' -- the normal unaccountability legislators enjoy, because citizens are distracted and their concerns are diffused over the entire legal code, can be remedied.

Actually, I do think you're on to something, in part because the change itself would change the nature of law. Automatic sun-setting and expiration, for instance, would winnow down the legal code in a matter of time. As a system, it certainly has potential.

This would go well with another favorite reform of mine, which is the Delegatory Republic, described here: http://www.keithgould.com/2009/08/delegatory-representation....

Basically it's a system of representation in which it's direct democracy in the base-case, yet any individual can at any time empower another with their vote (thus making them their representative). Ultimately you get a hierarchy of delegation, with what we would currently call reps would just be those who at any moment in time currently have the top vote empowerment totals. No terms, not necessarily any districts, no need for parties or runoffs or anything of the sort. Just an online system for tracking the delegations.

However, there's a separate concern, apart from whether a system would work, which is how to bring it about. I'm a big believe in Condorcet & Approval voting, but getting them through the public process, with established players dead-set against them, is an enormous challenge.

Part of my thinking with VoteReports is that it approximates the Delegatory Republic, where the delegatees are report creators, rather than other individuals, but within the current system. That part is key: it doesn't require systemic change to implement, the change can be brought about from outside the system.

So that's another point to think on, for projects like these: what can I do now? How can it work from the outside?

This along with a word limit to new laws (1 page), and version control, so that instead of adding 100 pages amending 1000 random clauses, we, you know actually amend the document.

Assuming this limit to be practicable (which I doubt; consider complex subjects like corporations law) it would have the effect of giving the judiciary more power. Such succinct laws would need considerable interpretation. I note that bad common-law precedents are a problem as well as bad legislation. Shorter laws don't help this situation. Nor does a more powerful judiciary.

The word limit would or one page rule, would not work out as an absolute in practise. But it would be nice as a guide.

The version control is a very good idea that might actually work in practise. At least from a technical point of view. I don't know whether some people actually prefer the old system of amending.

If it is a rule, it's a rule. There is no reason why every law could not be broken down into one page. Right now ( in the US) we have these massive changes that are encompassing thousands of new rules or modifications to existing rules.

This is a bad idea for the same reason that pushing massive untested changesets into an application would be a bad idea. Incremental, atomic changes that could be revoked is a much better practice on nearly every front (except for maintenance of the power of politicians)

I am wary, that a one page rule would have unintended side effects. Like not reducing the complexity, but making the wording extremely terse instead.

Totally agree, it would need to be accompanied by a corresponding change in the culture of governance (and is highly unlikely), but one can wish.

That's why making the one page rule a rule of honour instead of a formal rule might help. Because you want people following the spirit of the rule instead of its letter.

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