On and on it goes, until finally one student gives the answer we are looking for. “it is a stack of paper.” Exactly: words printed on paper. In the end, that is what the legal code is, or at least what it always was until we developed digital legal databases and it became words represented by zeros and ones. And once we see what the legal code really is, its failures to change behavior do not seem so surprising. Simply by writing a text, legislators somehow hope to change real everyday behavior. But how can text, whether printed or digital, affect our behavior? How can law in the books become
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