>A law prohibiting murder?

Seems like the kind of thing that should have no trouble getting rubber-stamped every few years.

Lets invert that though.

In 1615 Iceland passed a law stating that any Basque that set foot in the Westfjords /must/ be killed. They got around to abolishing it in 2015.

Seems like the sort of thing that probably should have been revoked earlier, no?

More generally, most countries legal codes are a god damn shitshow of strata so dense it takes years to decades of study to understand them even a little.

As a result, rulings are arbitrary and hard to predict, citizens are uninformed on the law and can be blindsided by vindictive police, new laws are disproportionately hard to create due to conflict resolution with old laws being required and parliaments enshrine old laws in tradition and are lothe to amend them.

In general, it's the legal equivalent of that codebase that no one is willing to change because no one remembers why things were implemented in the first place.

Lets not pretend that adding expiry clauses to existing or new laws would lead to a world where murder is legal. That'll get tracked pretty closely and refreshed on the regular. I would expect two outcomes:

1. A government department is created specifically for the purpose of tracking and ranking upcoming law expiries by importance. We should probably have something like this already.

2. For the things society holds really dear, murder/rape/assault, taxes, driving laws etc, I would expect to see a regular "refresh the core issues" session at the start of every year. Essentially a formality where the government can go "yep, torture is still bad, moving on".

However, I'd expect most of the random statutes against oral sex that are still all across the US to expire pretty quickly with lawmakers by and large not giving enough of a shit to refresh them, and that's /good/. Those laws serve no meaningful purpose, their only use is as a weapon for corrupt police to threaten average citizens with.

A yearly review of all of the laws would be labour intensive (read expensive). Governments will simply say "reviewing all the laws means we have to raise taxes to pay for the review, so instead we're going to do a blanket refresh on all laws"

I'm envisioning the average sunset clause being more like 20 years. The annual refresh would be "lets make sure this doesn't expire" done voluntarily for the things that are really important that are currently going to expire in 19 years but everyone wants to reset their timer every year just in case.

I also don't really think it's that big a deal to ask the government to once a year go "we all still think rape's pretty uncool? yep? great, all in favor of amending the Consolidated Sexual Offenses Act 2019's expiry to be 2038, up from 2037? Done! Moving on."

I imagine any politician that objected would get eviscerated in the public eye. Should be a one-hour-a-year process to knock out all the key stuff, particularly if everyone knows first sitting session of the year is the refresh-the-core-values session.

That doesn't sound like a review, it sounds like busy work

One of the problems right now is the sheer size of some laws that get passed a matter of hours after their final draft is released, with no good way that I know of for people to diff the various versions and catch things. Already no one's reading all the laws.

That's a separate issue. This isn't even really a matter of law, it should be a matter of simple parliamentary procedure that laws will not be considered unless their draft has been available unedited for three months, unless there is a unanimous vote to have them be considered early.

Fair point. A blanket renewal is nearly as pointless as no auto-expiration.

There is a solution though: write fewer laws. Ideally so few that citizens can reasonably be expected to know them, or at least so they can be counted.

I wonder if a society can function with a max of 1000 laws at any one time?

Teach law in school. Require students to understand law, because they are citizens that have to follow those laws. If kids can't do it well, then the laws would need to be changed.

A more scalable approach would be to tie the sunset date to the number of votes the bill receives when it becomes law.

So, if something receives an unanimous vote in favor, maybe it shouldn't have a limited term at all. Something that has a 3/4 supermajority in favor can probably last for a few decades without review. Something that barely squeaks by with 50%+1 should be considered a crutch, to review at the earliest opportunity (i.e. sunset shortly after the next election date).

Furthermore, any new vote on a repeal of an existing law should override earlier counts. So something that was originally passed unanimously only doesn't sunset for as long as nobody tries to repeal it. If there's a repeal vote, even if that fails, the new vote percentage establishes the sunset.

This would have some very interesting effects on legislatures, especially those dominated by two or three parties. The dominant party would have to balance between passing uncompromising laws that sunset very quickly, versus compromise that might amass a supermajority sufficient to close the issue for a long time.

The sunset clause for the constitution and amendments should probably be on the order of decades; those aren't individual actions but wide ranging codes, with a VERY HIGH BARRIER of entry (and they should have just as high a bar to clear for maintenance). They should still be reviewed, curated and maintained over time to keep them matched to contemporary language. The changes in language would also allow for re-review of case law and other methods of defining what laws mean. That would also be a strong reason for maintaining the language as is if it currently works.

(edit)

Also, like DHCP leases, for such important items you'd want multiple review chances. E.G. If it's a 100 year expiration, review at 30 left, 15 left, 10 and 5+ left possible to review at any time.

> you'd want multiple review chances.

Since political whims can very on a frequent basis, such reviews should require consensus over time to have an effect. Ie. 3 successive presidents must decide the constitution is a bad idea before it can be abolished, etc.

Modification, including deletion, would require nominal level of legislative action. The reviews would obviously require a little less, but still enough for a clear majority.

Failure to renew before the actual sunset is what would trigger the automatic deletion/deactivation.

Gotta make sure we allow the next Congress to remove 99% of the laws protecting the citizens and declare the speaker the new ruler of the USA. Duh.

These laws sounds nice but in practice shouldn't be blanket applied to everything, you've very easily pointed out why.