Madman adds to my point about India having too many laws. He says that many of the laws are very old – many more than a hundred years old.
I agree with Amardeep Singh’s comment there. The age of a law by itself should not be a problem. In an ideal (and libertarian) world, the only reason to add new laws would be technological change. In fact, I’d say that if it turns out that a law needs frequent changes to keep up with changing realities, it probably means that the law is unnecessarily complex.
For example, a law like the first amendment to the US constitution – “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech…” will probably never need changing, because it covers all speech, including those written on paper, published as a webpage, spoken over the phone or sent as SMSes. (Though to be fair, another amendment to the constitution – the fourteenth – does modify the meaning of “Congress” to include all government bodies in the US)
If the language had been very specific, or, like our framers, it had contained exceptions and special cases (“Notwithstanding anything written in this section, the Congress may, in times of national emergency as defined in section 5. subsection 3, limit the number of pages in a newspaper…”) then that law would have had to change every fortnight, if only to plug loopholes (and create new ones, needless to say)
The Indian Contracts Act of 1872 is a case in point. It made an exception for “gaming contracts” i.e. gambling agreements were not enforceable under the law. The problem with this piece of moral legislation is that the futures market could not take off in India, because a Futures contract is, after all, a game of chance.
They fixed the problem somehow. I don’t know how, but I am quite certain they did not do it by removing the exception, because that would have legalised gambling. I think they added an exception to the exception. Now we will just have to wait for someone to come out with a “cricket futures” for the moral police to ask for an exception to the exception to the exception.
The other problem with the contracts act was that contracts in electronic form weren’t valid. That is something that legitimately required change.
New laws would be needed when technological innovations create newer forms of property rights that require demarcation (such as the invention of radio requiring parceling out airwaves, development of the internet requiring definition of rights over domain names) They’d also be required when changes in technology create new harms that we can inflict on one another. (For example, air pollution, noise pollution overuse of groundwater, etc. ) But some of the laws that Madman mentions aren’t wrong because they are old – they are simply bad ones. The law criminalising homosexuality or the one punishing adultery with a jail sentence, for example. They aren’t outdated. They are wrong. They simply shouldn’t have existed even a hundred years back.
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I guess I need to write more clearly.
My main point was that some of the old laws are not equipped to handle today’s requirements. Need I point out how wonderful the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 is? Some of them need to be rewritten from scratch, not amended constantly with exceptions.
As for the inherently wrong ones, of course they were wrong 100 years back too. But we could argue that people were less “enlightened” back then and laws legislating morality were acceptable. However, by letting those laws remain on the books, we do ourselves great injustice in the 21st century. That was my secondary point.
(Incidentally, the Bangalore Metro project can’t set up a standard gauge monorail system because something in the Railways Act says that only broad gauge rail systems can be constructed in India. I am shortly going to set up a web site to oppose the Bangalore Metro rail project.)
Yes the telegraph act is quite clearly one that should be changed to keep up with technology.
I agree with you about us being supposedly more enlightened now. In fact that would have been the last sentence of my post. I decided to take it off for some reason.
Ravi,
The point Madman was trying to make his gay laws is this : Laws are a reflection of the society. There were obviously a lot less people who thought homosexuality could be condoned in 1875 than there are today.
your reasoning that they are wrong is simply a bad way of putting it – tell me then why is it wrong? and what is wrong as opposed something that is “right”. Let the logic for civilization not be based on chicken hearted men who sit in judgement of others, having distinctions between right and wrong.
In response to Madman’s reponse, Bangalore Metro (as of 6 April ’05) calls for standard gauge and it is NOT a monorail. It is going to be a mass-transit, high capacity rail system similar to the Delhi Metro (http://www.delhimetrorail.com). What is your opposition to the Bangalore Metro?
I too don’t understand why should there be an opposition to Bangalore Metro rail. We have suffered enough from the BMTC. Let’s have some relief. I would be much more happier if some more thinking goes into the planning of the Metro line. It should start from Dodda Ballapur and Chikka Ballapur in the north and end near somewhere after Bommasandra in the south that way will cater to large popluation. Surely it’s going make a lot of money if the length of the line is increased. The chickkaballapur line should pass through the new international airport. Again this is going to help people going to the airport.