Switzerland cleaning up its laws
September 10th, 2007As Jusletter reports, the Swiss federal government proposes to repeal 11% of the federal statutes and to purge another 8%. 31 federal laws and parliamentary resolutions might be gone soon, together with 168 regulations.
It’s nothing new that laws are information themselves, and that they are prone to all the problems that come under the heading of information quality. But the subject nevertheless raises interesting questions:
How did they find out that they don’t need a given provision any longer? Did they check the access statistics for the (excellent) corpus juris of the Confederation, the federal government’s most popular website as an official explained to me once? Did they e-mail the competent authorities and ask them to scan the laws relevant to their field of activity? And how do they make sure that no provision will be struck that is still needed?
How much did the whole ”deep scan” of the corpus cost, and how much money do they expect to save with this clean-up? If no-one uses a law any longer, its mere existence on paper and on servers does not seem to do much harm.
This might be worth some research, which I don’t have time to do, unfortunately. The regulatory problem being to find out whether a law is still “alive”, i.e. needed and complied with, reminds me of the difficulties doctors sometimes have when they have to decide whether a patient is deeply comatose or brain dead.