Item — HN Reader

How would you feel if:

(1) The law books were pretty expensive...but some minimum number of public libraries had copies of the books in their Reference (may not be checked out) sections?

(2) The expensive law books were pretty much all in subjects that didn't concern you - building code for steel mills, regulations for operating an ocean freighter, depreciation rules for oil refineries?

(3) "The letter of the law" was freely available - but it's a muddled mess of vagueness, insider jargon, "gotta be a lawyer to understand the mental framework here", and just so hellishly long that you would have to devote your life to some sub-sub-sub-section of the law (plus the administrative regulations based on it, rulings in related court cases, etc.) to have any chance of knowing and understanding it?

(1) See my other comment, this is pretty similar to having to pay for them, except now you pay with your time, and proportional to your... geographical placement? That doesn't make a lot of sense.

(2) See my other comment.

(3) That's bad.

You seem to present this as a trilemma, when it's not.

(4) Pay for the creation in some more sensible way, e.g. the same way more pedestrian laws are created. The law that says you aren't allowed to shoot people at will was also made by someone, and that work was not free.

My point (poorly made, perhaps) was more that lots of kinda-reasonable-sounding stuff like (1), (2), and (4) doesn't much matter if the final reality of the law is often more like (3). At least in the U.S., my impression is that (3) is rather often the case.