Would a system of government succeed if there was a cap placed on the amount of laws controlling personal behavior? This would be laws covering abortion, gun control, theft, etc., but not building codes, tax code, etc… If the limit were to be reached a law would have to be sacrificed in order to create a new one.
I fail to see how that would be a good idea in a world where new things are constantly being invented. I think the result would be that the limit gets tossed out, or the society falls into lawlessness as soon at the limit is reached and more and more things appear that the law is not allowed to address.
Even if people agreed on what the laws should be about, they would argue over what the law would say: Guns are banned or Guns are permitted. Abortions are banned or Abortions are permitted. If a law is needed, why not have it? And who decides how many laws there should be?
Upon further thought, I think the result would be a proliferation of bigger, less coherent laws as the government gets around the limit by writing omnibus laws that are an agglomeration of what would otherwise be many smaller laws. And a great deal of wrangling in courts about exactly what constitutes a single law. When you get right down to it, I don’t see any reason (besides the fact that doing so would be pointless and silly) why the government couldn’t just gather up all existing law and call it “The One Law” with lots and lots and lots of subsections.
I’d be okay with every law (or at least every new law) having a sunset clause.
That would pretty much mean the end of civil rights. Considering that it can take decades to win new rights and protections, they would be eroded away faster than they could possibly be put back into law.
I’m not following you. Do you think that if, say, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was set to expire next year that there would be a tough battle to get it renewed? Look at something like the Voting Rights Act which can be very well argued to be no longer needed. It gets reauthorized by wide margins.
Many, if not most, civil rights exist because the Constitution forbids the making of certain kinds of laws. For instance, the First Amendment prohibition against making laws abridging the freedom of speech is far more important than any law that specifically seeks to protect free speech in some particular circumstance.