Why So Many Laws?

The basis of a civilized society is law. The law allows for standardized treatment of men, the law allows people to plan their futures, the law gives people assurance that wills, contracts, and trusts will be enforced, that certain behavior will be allowed while other behavior (crimes and torts) will be punished, etc.

Five important characteristics of "the law" in a civilized society follow: 1) The law must be of manageable size so the average man can learn the law without a lifetime of study. 2) The law must be simple enough for the average man to grasp and understand. 3) The law must be stable so men can, once they learn the law, live their lives with great assurance that they know the law and are not violating the law. 4) The law must be internally consistent so a man who follows one law does not find himself violating some other law. And last, but not least, 5) "man made" law must harmonize with the unchanging law of God.

Each of these principles needs to studied in light of America's current legal structure:

Manageable size: The typical public or academic law library contains over 100 million pages (in excess of 100,000 volumes) of statutes, regulations, reported legal decisions, commentaries, cross indexes, law dictionaries, legal encyclopedias, law review articles, etc. However, most law libraries have found all these pages inadequate. In the last ten years they have added "on line" access to great legal web sites run by Lexis and West Legal Publishing. These web sites allow law students and lawyers to do quick searches of all published material related to a given topic. These web sites are expensive but if the right legal key words are entered the results are very useful. Twenty to one hundred pages of information is displayed on the screen. In an hour or two any journeyman lawyer will know all that is worth knowing about some narrow area of the law. Of course, total or complete knowledge is beyond human reach. No one not even the most dedicated legal scholar can claim to know "all the law". In fact America's situation recalls ancient Rome, just before its fall, when the laws began to multiply. A sage of the late Roman Empire remarked "A corrupt society has many laws".

Simplicity: As the preceding description makes clear, mastery of legal jargon is needed to figure out which key words will yield the right information during the search. Additionally, mastery of legal jargon is needed to understand the information that is ultimately displayed. Average people have first to learn a mass of legal jargon if they want to understand the laws they live under. Appellant Court judges will readily admit that they write their opinions for practicing lawyers not average people. They do this to show where prior precedents are being upheld and where prior precedents are being changed or clarified. Their opinions only make sense if the reader is already familiar with the earlier opinions by other judges baring on this area of the law. This all sounds well and good until one realizes that these opinions are at least as powerful as legislated law in determining what average people can and can not do. The real effect of these obtuse, carefully crafted opinions written for the practicing lawyer, is to make the law unknowable to the average citizen unless he is prepared to pay a lawyer to study the "law" (court opinions) and then explain it in layman's terms.

Stable & Rarely Changed: Cicero and Aristotle felt that laws should be few in number and seldom changed. Saint Thomas Aquinas went farther saying that change in the law was in and of itself undesirable and that any change to the law requires strong justification. Despite this wonderful advice from these great sages of Western Civilization, in America change is the order of every day: (a) the 44,000 page tax law changes every year as does the 100,000 page rule book governing Medicare, (b) the suspense calendar in Congress is always full of special legislation designed to favor certain preferred groups, (c) general laws at both the State and Federal levels are regularly passed which give regulators the right to issue (and change) "implementing regulations" without any review by elected legislators, and (d) the courts (Federal and state) regularly change, overturn, or interpret legislation, regulations, and earlier court opinions. The volume of change is staggering.

Internally Consistent: As the mass of law, court decisions, and regulation increases, changes and grows in complexity, it is logical to expect that various inconsistencies will occur. Of course, inconsistencies crop up all the time, in fact this happens so often that Law Schools now offer whole courses on the CONFLICT OF LAWS. If lawyers are confused think of the poor average citizen who has to somehow function. An example might illustrate the problem: One compliance manager at small stock brokerage firm had a question about what stock research could be offered for sale over the internet. After talking to four lawyers, he had four distinct "opinions" on the issue. After spending a thousand dollars for legal advise and many hours listening to the advice, the compliance manager didn't know what to do. The first lawyer suggested that the safest path seemed to involve registering his firm in every state as a Registered Investment Advisor (State RIA) and spending $15,000 per year and hundreds of hours filling out forms. Of course, the laws of all fifty states would have to be followed even if they conflicted with each other. The second lawyer suggested seeking a Federal investment