More money for them then.

It does not mean detailed. If a law cannot be written in 3,000 words then it was written for lawyers, by lawyers to provide for their future descedents.

The first income tax law was four pages.

Today it is the equivalent of 8 volumes of the King James Bible. One is precise the other detailed. One everyone understood, the other no one does.

When a law exceeds 1,000 pages written in legalese you can bet K street wrote it and no one understands it.

If I were King the first decree I would pass is to limit the number of lawyers permit to practise to one one hundredth of the number of engineers in the nation.

You always seem to be dead on. Bravo.

Comment by Juan — 7/6/2009 @ 2:04 pm

Well, you have to have a lawyer to understand the laws that are created by lawyers.
Sort of a job-preservation tool.
“A Government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers,
shall not perish without an inordinate amount of litigation.”

We see pols use the military, police, and bureaurocrats as stage-props all of the time, when did SEK denounce any of them?
How about when WJC used his own Cabinet Officers, various Senators, and Congressmen/women as a stage-prop for his finger-wagging lie: “I never had sex with that woman…”?
Did SEK denounce Bubba?

But really, a lot of these bills are just bloated with exceptions that are not designed for fairness. Lobbyists get this and that and the bill becomes unworkable.

Most of the legislation passed when I worked on the hill was stupid. We can write shorter bills that are precise if we want to. We really need to revist so many of our laws and make things easy to read.

It blows my mind that legal research is something that a citizen cannot do without expensive tools like Lexis. We need to make sure that all laws are simple to read, and also that all court cases are easy to ’shepardize’ and understand as they apply to each individual. When a judge issues a ruling, part of his job should be to update the government’s free to access website to explain exactly what the law is, and what changes have been made. Even if to say ‘nothing was changed’. And the circuit courts should have as a responsibility to edit that to keep consistency.

Instead, we have a big mess.

Or better yet: if you want to kill something, make the bill huge.

“Why not limit any bill to no more than 3,000 words. Make it so precise and limited that anyone could read and understand it.”

Precision makes the bills larger, not smaller. The sherman antitrust act is short. But not precise. It basically gives power to courts.