The number of shelves in law libraries devoted to federal laws has grown enormously and will continue to do so, until the U.S. collapses under the weight of its laws. From DiveMedic at theburningplatform.com:
This is a Sunday, and I am sleeping in. So I thought I would give you a repost of something that I said more than ten years ago.
Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:
That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.
What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. That isn’t all, though. There is also the United States Code:
The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.
“The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state” is attributed to the Roman historian Tacitus.