I want to be a lawyer, but I’m lazy, and not all that bright.
Which country (with a stable government) has the fewest laws?
An absolute monarchy, perhaps? Do absolute monarchies even have lawyers, considering that the monarch can change the law at will?
I’ve heard it suggested that Communist nations (actually, totalitarian nations in general) have few laws, whereas “free” nations have many many laws.
The supposed logic goes like this: Totalitarian nations have a general rule that “You are forbidden to do anything except those acts that are specifically allowed by law.” They then have a small number of laws, specifying a small number of things people are allowed to do.
“Free” nations, OTOH, operate by a general rule that “You are permitted to do anything except those acts that are specifically forbidden by law.” They then have a million billion zillion laws, specifying a million billion zillion things you aren’t allowed to do.
ETA: Okay, that’s apocryphal and somewhat facetious, but it seems to make a point: Governments of any stripe tend to want to restrict people’s behaviors as much as possible, both to preserve order as well as to keep the people in line to protect the positions of “the people in power”. But totalitarian governments, vs free governments, have almost polar opposite strategies for doing so.
There’s more to lawyering than just the written laws, one needs to be know how the courts are interpreting the laws as documented in the precedents. You’ll want not only a country with few laws, you’ll want a young country without a long history of court cases. Helpful would be a country with minimum law enforcement as well …
South Sudan
Not necessarily, you’re working under the assumption that a country’s legal system gets created from zero. Often it gets inherited from whomever owned that area previously; I expect Israel is an exception but I also wouldn’t be surprised if their legal system has considerable British influence (more than, say, French or Roman).
Yes, if only because it’s necessary to divide labor. A single person can’t make all of the legal decisions that need to be made in a modern state. Brunei is an absolute monarchy (I think it’s the only country that doesn’t even try to look like it has elections) and it has lawyers, courts, etc.
Not British, Ottoman. Or rather, Ottoman, with a bit of British.
Then there is the issue of whether laws are enforced, a country can look totalitarian on the books but in reality be relatively “free” as long as you don’t piss off the big bosses.
I don’t think this is actually true of any real-world totalitarian nations. They would all subscribe officially to liberal principles that you can do anything that the law does not forbid, but then have (a) quite sweeping prohibitions which might be short in terms of language but wide in terms of effect or (b) police/regulatory agencies with wide powers to forbid or restrict activities in practice, or both.
In terms of counting words on a page, this may result in “less law”. If the law says that you may not conduct any trade or business for profit, then you don’t need laws forbidding specific trades (prostitution, drug dealing) and you don’t need laws regulating other trades (real estate agency, the practice of law, the sale of groceries or liquor). But if “laws” mean “state-imposed restrictions on what you can do”, then obviously these countries have much more law, and they will need a bigger enforcement mechanism to enforce the prohibitions and restrictions that other countries don’t have.
Typically, the sovereign can’t change laws at will. I think there’s always a minimal set of fundemental laws that he can’t change. And of course a lot of laws that he could change in theory but can’t in practice. “From now on, the official religion will be Islam instead of Catholicism” isn’t going to be possible.
In any case, the sovereign being able to change the law at will doesn’t mean there are few laws. After all, the parliament in a democracy also can change most laws at will. The source of the law (king, parliament) doesn’t have much bearing on how many laws are passed.
And of course there’s going to be lawyers in an absolute monarchy, for the same reason there will be courts. The sovereign isn’t going to decide personnally and arbitrarily (even if he decides personnally, your king is very likely to follow tradition or legal advice) on every single case, which would be the only situation where you wouldn’t need laws, courts and lawyers.
I would assume that a less organized society would have less laws. Ancient codes (say, the code of Hammurabi, or the Salic law) are very short. But to decide on all the presumably numerous situations not covered by your small set of laws, you then need either to rely on custom and precedent (and then you need to know well the customs and precedents instead of knowing well written law) or to decide “in equity” (not sure it’s the proper word in english), that is according to what seems just in the particular case submitted. The latter situation probably guarantees few laws, but also an extreme unreliability of the justice system. You’d never clearly know what is allowed and what is forbidden, nor could predict reliably the outcome of the trial if someone complains about your actions.
Interesting. Do you mean that the legal system is influenced by the Ottoman system, or that Ottoman law is still valid? For instance if there isn’t any more recent law, would an Ottoman law from 1887 still apply?
The place was part of the Ottoman Empire until after the Great War, when it was assigned to the UK as a “mandate” territory - meaning, it wasn’t formally a British possession, it was simply being administered by the British under the auspices of the League of Nations. The idea was that mandate territories would transition to being independent states, but the timescale for this, and the precise terms on which it was to happen, were left to be determined later. In the meantime Britain (in the case of the Palestine mandate) was to administer the territory. Note that the Palestine mandate included not only what is now Israel, but also what are now the Palestinian Territories and the Kingdom of Jordan.
The mandate didn’t give the British licence to conduct a root-and-branch legal and cultural revolution, to “briticise” the place. Existing laws and institutions continued in force and in operation, except to the extent that the mandate power amended or replaced them. The main change the British made was to institute a court system based on the English model with courts of appeal, a respect for the binding nature of precedent, etc, but the actual written laws that were interpreted and applied by those courts were not fundamentally rewritten. Most of the civil legal codes were left in place, amended only as necessary to deal with changed circumstances and new developments.
The transition (for part of the mandate territory) from mandate to independent State of Israel was a more fundamental change but, as is well known, the State of Israel has no Constitution which might set out a new fundamental basis for law and the legal system. Israel does have the Basic Laws, but these mainly deal with the formation and role of the principal institutions of the state, and the relations between the state’s authorities, and some basic civil rights. They don’t contain any fundamental principles for a legal system regulating relations between citizens, or between communities within the state. So for instance laws dealing with land and property, marriage and divorce, disputes between citizens, trade and commerce, etc, etc all continued on, subject to amendment by the Knesset. And of course the Knesset has done quite a lot of legislating since 1948, but much of it (as with any other legislature) is specific, ad hoc or piecemeal.
In the 1960s or 1970s they did adopt a new civil code dealing with contracts and torts which (I think) drew not only on the existing (Ottoman-origin) laws but also on English common law and on some “green field” thinking. They reworked the criminal code some years later. There are ongoing projects to adopt new codes in some other areas of law but, SFAIK, they haven’t touched the fundamentals of land law or family law and have no current plans to.
So, yes, my understanding is that a pre-mandate Ottoman law which has not been repealed or amended, and is not overridden by a later inconsistent law of the mandate or the State of Israel, would still be in force.