[backpackviolet]

> I would add that any law passed must have a relatively short sunset clause. This forces us to reconsider laws periodically to make sure they're still relevant.

I like this idea in theory, and I'd love to find a way to implement it. But I think we'd find ourselves in a situation where we either spend a ton of time rubber-stamping all the "good laws", or we end up not having laws for stuff people all agree on and don't waste time rubber-stamping because why bother with the effort if everyone abides by the law anyway ... until decades later we get another guy doing a bunch of destabilizing horseshit because it's not technically illegal.

[lordnacho]

If not an automatic sunset, I would propose a different rule: for every law, we stipulate what statistical measures we thought would be improved by the law over some time period. Like "we think if kids are all fed at school, pass rates will increase 5%". Then check after 5 years to see if that happened, and we can decide what to do.

At the moment every law has an imprecise expected outcome and we never go back to think about whether the intervention worked.

I'm not saying use the stats mechanically to cancel the law if it fails, just that there ought to be a post-fact consideration of whether something worked.

[candiddevmike]

This is great. Have some kind of "definition of success" with laws that will be used in the future to gauge their effectiveness. If the law isn't having the desired outcome, it gets repealed.

Truthfully, outcome based legislature would be quite a bit more readable too, as the outcome bit will spell out exactly the intention of the law.