{"id":271,"date":"2005-03-22T05:05:24","date_gmt":"2005-03-21T18:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/03\/21\/old-and-archaic-laws\/"},"modified":"2005-03-21T23:37:08","modified_gmt":"2005-03-21T18:07:08","slug":"old-and-archaic-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200503\/old-and-archaic-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"Old and Archaic Laws"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madman adds<\/a> to my point about India having too many laws. He says that many of the laws are very old<\/i> – many more than a hundred years old. <\/p>\n

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.
\n
\nFor 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)
\nIf 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)<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The other problem with the contracts act was that contracts in electronic form weren’t valid. That is something that legitimately required change.
\nNew 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. <\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}