Expiration dates for laws

Given the amount of laws in the books that were generally irrelevant after, say, about 50 years of their passing, why don’t legislators pass new laws with expiration dates?

What, like murder will cease to be illegal in 2007? :smiley:
Another question might be, given that politicians have been passing laws for a long time, how come they never seem to slow down? They’re always pushed for legislative time. Did they all do such a bad job previously?

For one thing, the meaning of the word murder will change. Another thing is that the word murder doesn’t totally describe the law as on paper. There are several different levels to murder, and although I never actually read the laws, I suspect that they’re very descriptive. Reviewing the law’s description in relation to current social norms and language seems wise. Also, who’s to say that murder, or some degree of murder, won’t be legal at some future time? Abortion may be a good example.

A lot of laws do have expiration dates. Criminal laws usually don’t, but many others do. These are usually to ensure that something doesn’t get funded forever and ever.

I guess the Constitution should have an expiration date on it while we’re at it.

If a law’s wording becomes ambiguous, judges will take note of it and the relevant legislating body will probably amend the law.

The reason most laws don’t have expiration dates is that the legislators don’t want them to. If you propose a law that makes armed robbery illegal, but only for the next 30 years, you are probably going to lose the next election. Where laws do have an expiration date, it was usually as a political compromise to get it passed, like the Civil Rights Act of the '60’s.

THat isn’t to say it would be a bad idea to have expiration dates on laws, it just isn’t going to happen though. The politicians don’t want it.

I believe murder is mostly a common law crime (which means it is not statutory).

In California, murder is quite explicitly defined in the California Penal Code.

Actually all states have murder statutes which are derived from the common law definition. But early common law didn’t have the various levels that we do now–1st or 2nd degree, and manslaughter was kind of a late addition to common law which has been expanded upon now in state statutes.

I can think of two reasons not to put expiration dates on laws (particularly on criminal law). But as mentioned some laws do have expiration dates. One that I can think of was the law creating the Office of Independent Counsel. That one had to be renewed every so often and this last time was not.

The reasons not to:

  1. If all laws had an expiration date, eventually your legislative body would become overwhelmed with consideration of expiring laws. Most would still be worthwile and need renewal. Eventually the body would have to enact some rule that says the law is automatically renewed unless explicitly denied renewal. That is essentially the system we have now.

  2. What happens when a goof happens? Eventually some relatively important law will be up for renewal and no one will notice or it will fall through the cracks. Perhaps there will be a two day period when arson is not illegal.

Then why don’t we make a law requiring laws to be periodically reviewed within, say, er, 35 years or so if they have survived unrepealed?

Feel free to ignore this hijack, it just seemed like most people were in agreeance and had consistant reasons with the no automatic expiration date.