opinions-political-minimalLaw

The thesis that law (taken here to mean binding rules of any social organization) should be as small as it can be (like a microkernel; do everything in "userspace" if possible). Why?

• Law can be inflexible. In many organizations, it takes a lot of time for law to change and to execute. Less formal methods of operation are faster.
• The more law there is, the more time that entities involved with the organization will have to devote to understanding the law. In a small organization, this is how much time is spent reading through the bylaws, when individuals could be doing something else. In a large society, this corresponds to how much of the labor pools is lawyers, some of whom could have other more directly productive jobs if the law was simpler.
  • Part of the slowness of law comes from the extra intellectual work needed by all parties in crafting and understanding all of the myriad details incorporated into the law.
• Law can provoke conflict.
  • By stating things precisely, all parties are denied the option to defer possible disagreements by leaving things vague. The flip side of this is that stating things precisely can prevent future conflict by making it clear to everyone what their rights and responsibilities are.
  • Just because something is legal doesn't mean it is moral. Yet, in many communities, this maxim is not often applied, and folks tend to think that that they are cannot be doing something really bad if they never break the law. This encourages people to do things that they would otherwise have considered immoral (and doing those things causes conflict with others). One especially strange example of this is frivolous lawsuits; in many places, they are not illegal, however many (not all) people consider them immoral.
  • The extra conflict introduced by precision is one reason that law moves slowly.
• In some cases, those entities regulated by laws are considered to be morally obligated not to break the law (most governmental systems of law work this way, especially the criminal side of things). It makes no sense to imagine that someone is morally obligated to obey a body of law if they do not have the resources to read and understand the entirety of that law first.

-- me ---