The Characteristics

Of Laws






In a democracy, the objective of laws is to serve the best interests of the people and reflect their
highest aspirations. Laws are the useful, i.e., problem-solving, means of government by which the
ends of government are attained. Since laws have the same general characteristics as all other
useful products, they, too, can be designed and improved by the same quality methods used
to design and optimize other products.


EVERY LAW OF GOVERNMENT HAS THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERISTICS:

Letter of the Law
A law is a written order -- a set of instructions, or software -- that provides directions for human
behavior. The entire written content of a law is the "letter of the law," and it is nothing more or less
than the fixed arrangement of its words and punctuation. The letter of the law conveys the spirit of
the law.

Spirit of the Law
Contained within the letter of the law is the purpose, or intent, which is termed the "spirit of the law."
For any given law, the spirit of the law is the hoped-for change, or benefit, that the law will
produce, as predicted by the designers of the law. In other words, laws are tools that are intended to
be useful. Since the spirit of the law is the reason for its existence, the letter of the law is
subordinate to the problem-solving intent of the law.

Sanctions
Laws are the forcible means by which a government achieves its goals; they are
coercions, restrictions, prohibitions, or commands for action that attempt to regulate or change the
behavior or status of those individuals and institutions that are subject to the law.

To encourage individuals and institutions to comply with the law, each law has a mechanism of
enforcement, or authorized sanction (the "carrot or stick"), that is applied to accomplish the intent of
the law. Subsidies, fines, and imprisonment are examples of mechanisms that may be used as the
forcible sanction of a law.

Costs
All laws consume and divert resources. The costs to a government for the creation and operation of
its body of laws are borne by the people. To pay the direct costs of laws, governments create and
enforce additional laws (at additional cost to the people) to raise revenue through sanctions such as
taxes, fees, and fines.


There are nine principal costs of a law of government:

1) The cost of the research and design effort that is required to create the law.
2) The cost of the legislature to conduct the legislative process and perform legislative
oversight of the law.
3) The cost to promulgate the law, its amendments, and eventual repeal.
4) The disbursement of funds from the treasury as specified by the law.
5) The cost to enforce the law.
6) The cost to administer and interpret the law in the courts of justice.
7) The cost of compliance: the time, labor, and funds that are expended by those who
are required to comply with the law.
8) The opportunity cost, or the loss of opportunity for individuals and institutions to conduct
alternative activities of high value, such as education or research, because the
resources for those activities were instead applied to the law.
9) The cost to assure and improve the quality of the law through quality assurance
(QA) and quality improvement (QI) programs.

Side Effects
Laws, like all other human creations, may or may not be useful, but they always produce unintended
side effects. The parameters used to measure the side effects of laws are the human rights, living
standards, and quality of life standards of the people -- any or all of which may be unintentionally
degraded when a law is enforced.

Performance
Since every law forces a change in the natural order of things and, since every law imposes
restrictions, incurs costs, and produces unwanted side effects, the performance, or usefulness of
each law, in terms of its overall effect upon the well being of the public, can be derived.

The performance of a law is, simply, the measure of the problem-solving benefit of the law minus
the measured sum of its burdens (restrictions, costs, and side effects). If the net benefit (benefit
minus burdens) is positive, the law is useful. If the net benefit is zero, the law is useless. If the net
benefit is negative, the law is detrimental. For a democracy, the only valid laws are those whose
net benefit is positive.

Fallibility
Laws are the product of human creative efforts and are therefore fallible. They may fail in their
objective as a result of design defects or become outmoded. They may also incur excessive costs
or produce unacceptable side effects. Fortunately, laws, like every other human-made product,
may be improved by design changes (amendments) and they may be repealed when they are found
to be less than useful.

In a democracy, the ultimate purpose of laws is to solve or mitigate the societal problems that
degrade or threaten to degrade the liberty and well-being of the people, i.e., the "public good."
Click here to learn more about the parameters that define the public good.