Laws give people power. If a law is complicated, it empowers people who can afford lawyers to interpret it. “Laws that are complicated, arbitrary, and unintuitive empower the state,” says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law and the Harvard Law Library’s director, “since prosecutorial discretion means they can pick whom to enforce against and be selective in discriminatory ways.” But making laws simpler and vaguer doesn’t necessarily move that power from the state to the people. You could get rid of a lot of laws and replace them with “everyone just needs to behave properly.” But
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