alt Hacker NewsLaws need to be managed like software: There should be a process for testing, user feedback, quick patches for bugs or conflicts, and regular updates to fix issues. If you think about it, both laws and software are called "code".
The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method. Lawmakers try to plan for everything, laws meant to solve one problem face feature creep and create a thousand others, then no one wants to touch anything after launch for fear of making things worse or because that one guy uses the temperature of his CPU as a quick-key and refuses to change his workflow.
Anyways, no law is perfect and never will be, and neither are the fixes.
Replies
> The problem is our legal system is still based on the waterfall method.
It's not? It has been "agile" for centuries. It is constantly patched as someone wants to address some issue. It's rather rare for a completely new law to be written.
> Lawmakers try to plan for everything
It's not? They see one bug, e.g. children being exploited, now they tried it with a patch that is horribly broken and doesn't really work, so they patched it again, to remediate one issue, while they try to figure out more patches.
Engineers and scientists would like to imagine our society operates off a specification. But laws are only justifications for what people in power want to do. All of what you’re talking about reinforces the myth that the text matters and is precisely defined.
It's also hilarious how poorly defined so many laws are. So many loopholes and bugs everywhere. Probably because most lawyers/politicians are effectively illiterate when it comes to logic.
California is a common law jurisdiction. Judges evaluate cases and make rulings based on the intent of the law instead of the literal text as written in order to avoid absurdities, setting precedent for future similar cases. If the lawmakers disagree with case law, they amend the law.
Software development is slower in larger, more political organisations (hello Change Advisory Boards) and larger/older/sprawling codebases.
Most governments are huge, highly political, slow moving organisations. It seems to just come with the territory: slower rollout of changes, longer periods to observe the changes in the wild (throw in a few years to see how the law plays in legal cases/challenges), and suddenly you have fewer iterations to get it right.