> can't even count the number of possible ways you can commit a crime

This strikes me as a bizarre thing to say and I'm curious what meaning you ascribe to this statement.

What would be the value of counting such a thing? Why would you want your tax dollars spent on such a task? What do you mean by "possible ways" - like possible legal theories or possible factual scenarios? Would you count non-common law aggravating elements as constituting separate offenses (e.g., at the state level, would you count DUI First Offense and DUI Second Offense as different offenses in jurisdictions where they use a separate statute or subsection instead of sentencing guidelines?)? Would you need the federal government to re-enumerate state laws for each state in which there exists federal land with exclusive jurisdiction? Or would citing the Assimilative Crimes Act be sufficient?

It's a way to show that the legal system is too complex. In the 80s the Justice Department tried to count the total number of criminal laws and they failed.[0] If the government can't even keep track of the number of them, then how is it reasonable to expect regular people to follow all of them?

[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio...

That's completely nonsensical. Your argument is analogous to saying "C is entirely too complex of a language, C programmers can even tell me how many ways there are to add two things. Why can't you just add them?"

Context and nuance are important in any expert system. Claiming otherwise is asinine.

This is a feature, not a bug for the classes which benefit from the ever expanding legal corpus. Coincidentally, politicians and lobbyists are often lawyers themselves.

That's the opposite of true. And I think you know that. It's absolutely insane that HN of all places is arguing against the concept of locality-of-reference.

Given the Option A (letting DoJ prosecutors only have to carry around Title 18) versus Option B (letting lay people looking up a topic by subject matter see what crimes and penalties pertain to that subject matter in the title for that subject matter), which one is friendlier to lawyers? Which one is friendlier to lay people?

Yeah, a DoJ official in 1982 probably found it inconvenient that 17 U.S.C. § 506 and 18 U.S.C. § 2319 aren't in the same deadtree volume for them to lug around. But if I'm a lay person, I'm glad that the criminal penalties for copyright infringement aren't invisible from within the chapter on copyright infringement in the title on copyright.

If I were to perform a code review for a junior engineer, and they had structured their source files so that all the constructors and destructors for all of their classes were in one independent file, rather than co-located with the classes to which they pertain, they would not pass code review. The argument that it's difficult to even know how many constructors and destructors they have, and therefore memory management is too complex, would be distinctly unpersuasive. It baffles and frustrates me that HN seems to come to the exact opposite conclusion with regard to the law.

The difference is that a lay person has to follow all of the laws.

The only reason this system works is because of privacy. Without it the system is just broken. But even with privacy it makes the system about luck.

> a lay person has to follow all of the laws

That is obviously untrue. Why do you feel the need to make obviously false claims to support your position?

You need to obey the UCMJ?

You need to obey campaign finance laws?

You need to obey the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act?

You need to obey state law as incorporated by the Assimilative Crimes Act in jurisdictions you've never been to?

You need to obey HIPAA? The Privacy Act? The Freedom of Information Act?

A huge number of laws simply do not apply to you if you aren't engaged in a particular activity. E.g., you are not a covered entity for HIPAA unless you work for a medical provider or insurer. And a huge proportion of those criminal penalties only apply to government employees, not to average civilians at all.

You need to be aware of that before making decisions in life though. You also need to be aware of them to know how others around you can legally act.

Also, there's the problem that you don't know what is written in the laws that you don't know. Maybe it does pertain to you, but without knowing the law you can't know that.