In Reply to: I’m not sure it’s that complicated, but it can’t be more… posted by Fuzzy on April 10, 2024 at 07:43:34
often made with respect to an existing law in deciding whether the law will hold or would need to be partially or fully negated. When that happens there are whole sublayers of other laws that were being fully or partially suppressed by the law that just got fully or partially repealed and there is no limit to how many such layers and ripple effects you can have. So that creates a type of dependency chain that would be like struggling with library dependencies in the early days of linux. You can imagine how complicated it can get ... add to that a bunch of local laws (so on average at least 50 more laws) that the SC decision impacts .... the level of complexity can pretty much blow up.
There may be an institutional response to this in the states and at the federal level, the equivalent of a package management system, if you will. But that kind of mechanism will need to be built and people who maintain that system will really need to understand what scope each law has and what portions of each law is being affected by the change that takes place upstream.
So if default sunsetting is not the solution, the only other way I can think of for methodical housekeeping would be law compilation so new laws do not just supercede all previous ones, but supplant them by incorporating and rewriting them as needed, so that there is no old law left to come back to life when the new one is being repealed through the congress or SC. Most repeals would more likely be partial under that scenario but that opens up its own can of worms (what happens if the repealed part needs to be rewritten?)
Otherwise, cataloging and keeping track of which laws override which other laws (unless specified in each individual new law being passed) could be an impossible task.
(Yeah, thinking about these things may sound like a waste of time on impractical questions, but this is the kind of stuff that I can geek out on forever.)