The essay “Kill All the Lawyers”, published on Disenz some two years ago (see also the Slovene version here), elaborated extensively on a phenomenon in the Slovene legal environment called “legal logorrhoea”. The term is derived from the name of a mental illness referred to as “logorrhoea”, usually defined as:
“Verbosity that uses many superfluous or fancy words or mental structures to disguise a useless or simple message as useful or intellectual.”
In the two years thereafter, the Slovene legal environment’s cancerous overgrowth with said disease has not stopped at all. Just the contrary: things are going from bad to worse to such an extent that the former essay merits a continuation with this second part (later to be capped off with part No. 3, and so at the end forming a trilogy). For instance, no less than 23 new bylaws have recently been added to the building legislation, in the previous essay already described as a “legislative jungle”.
There is no doubt that the situation with the Tacitan style plurimae leges is, in the modern world, much worse than at any time and place in the past.
One of these 23 new or amended bylaws regulates the documentation needed to get a building permit. Requirements from the old version of these rules from 2018 could have been satisfied with the presentation of “only” 22 documents. But six years later the new rules mandate that a potential builder must present no less than 67 different minutely prescribed forms, notifications, applications, opinions, conditions, permissions, etc., with five different commencement dates for the various parts of these requirements. This, again, leads to utter confusion about what is (already) in force at any given time, what perhaps is (still) not, and, if not, what applies instead. But one finds, not at all surprisingly, perhaps the biggest boost of logorrheic legal complication in the regulation concerning illegally built objects. Here it is no longer just a situation of “monetary indulgences” for illegal builders, regulated by the Building Act and a bunch of ever-changing special bylaws in a way that no serious illegally built building could have ever been torn down by the Slovene building inspection. The story goes on and further: one recent interim order, which temporarily reduced the competencies of the inspectorate, was even issued by no less an authority than the (quite naïve) Slovene Constitutional Court. So don’t worry, just build what and where you feel like building, as, before anybody stops you, some subsequent building act or a court decision will surely save you with further ways of blurring the situation, and so on ad infinitum. A notorious example is the private swimming pool of one Slovene attorney-politician-manager, illegally built on the public cliff of Ankaran, against which in six years the building inspectorate has not even managed to begin its procedures, which shall remain perfectly safe forever…
The production of logorrheic legal texts and structures may well be the most prosperous legal science of the day. More sophisticated products of the science in question are, namely, not at all just legal texts of hundreds of words in one sentence or, perhaps, legal acts regulating something with ten times too many legal provisions. Also already superseded is the horrible example of the Insolvency Act from the previous essay, where just one provision on the term of “insolvency” has been changed and expanded so much and so frequently that over the years no less than 818 judgments of the Slovene higher and supreme courts have been needed to try to ascertain its meaning. But a good year ago, all of this detailed and sophisticated adjudicating was made largely irrelevant with only one stroke of the legislator (and its advisors). Namely, the last amendment of the Insolvency Act called ZFPPIPP-H introduced a completely new legal category regulating the obligations and responsibilities of executives of companies in dire financial difficulties now defined as “imminent insolvency.” Nobody knows anything about this new legal category, all the court rulings on it will have to be made “ab novo”; in fact, there is great uncertainty even in the question of whether this new legal category is a replacement of the previous one, or maybe something that coexists, overlaps, or perhaps partly or in whole displaces the existing regulations. These and many other questions could apparently receive clarification only in about a decade and after a hundred or so court judgments. But in between the enforcement of any liability on companies’ managers on the basis of this new law (as well as the old one) remains more or less just an illusion.
As they are not effective against the owners of illegally built private swimming pools, or also against the failed businessmen seeking to completely evade their creditors through the over-complex rules on insolvency, Slovenia’s pleonastic, entropic, and cacophonic laws also fail to do the job in very many other situations. Some of them are extremely straightforward, as is, for instance, the situation of a rampant wolf (or a gang of wolves) that continues to slaughter sheep unchecked in the Gorenjska and Northern Primorska regions. Over-regulated Slovene laws are “solving” this wolf problem with the following:
“After the attack in Gorje, the conditions for culling one wolf were met as per the permit issued in June. But the permit was limited to the area of the pasture where this attack occurred. So, the following night, hunters from the Bled community waited in the pasture for the wolves to perhaps return. Many hunters worked in shifts, but no wolves appeared. According to the permit, they have ten further days to cull the wolf at this specific location.”
If the convoluted laws fail to effectively address a problem that could be solved with a single gunshot, it is even less likely that these laws will effectively handle more complex matters.
A wolf that has already slaughtered everything to his satisfaction in one area is indeed unlikely to return to a place where it has already indulged all of its bloody wishes to the lees. But if the convoluted laws fail to effectively address a problem that could be solved with a single gunshot, it is even less likely that these laws will effectively handle more complex matters. Our laws, and/or their typically Slovene God-fearing implementation, of course also fail to regulate, to the satisfaction of the people affected, the problem of one large, smelly, and noisy asphalt plant in the middle of the densely populated area of Vrtojba. The reasoning supporting the inaction against it, grounded in the messy competence regulations , could have been judged only as insane by anybody with a bit of common sense. Even when on some rare occasions the Slovene legal system and its operators decide to act, this (in the eyes of legal practitioners, as well as very many of their clients) almost inevitably comes as a lengthy treatise of inflated legal rhetoric, later to be annulled by some higher court with even more fancy legal argumentation in the opposite direction – until, after a decade or two, the divorced spouses are still killing one another for a spot on the same sofa in the undivided joint apartment, while various courts are jogging around which kitchen fork or knife should by legally correct evaluation belong to which of them.
All the above, and much more not fitting into this short essay, is by no means only about the isolated incidents of, say, a few slaughtered sheep. It is much more about the multitude of inflated legal and judicial rhetorical bravados, behind which a “parallel reality” of entirely different “law” could be hidden. But this kind of perversion of justice is by no means something happening only now and only in Slovenia. Two thousand years ago, the historians of that time were already writing on the states and societies where exaggerated, overwrought, formal legality masked an entirely different, often gravely corrupt “parallel reality” to the extent that such states and societies were judged doomed to collapse. This well-documented historical phenomenon was articulated for the first time by the ancient Roman historian Publius Cornelius TACITUS, one of the most important historians of all time (born 54 AD, died 117 AD). Tacitus belonged to the distinguished echelons of the Roman ruling elite and began his career as a brilliant privately appointed orator (attorney) before ascending to the highest official posts of senator, quaestor, praetor, and proconsul. Over the decades, he was one of the main creators of the vast and sophisticated legislation and judicature of the Roman Senate and its jurists. Even now he is still personally acclaimed for many of the legal bravados of his time. But in his later years, already freed of official duties, Tacitus the historian developed an astonishingly erudite theory on the role of the sophisticated achievements of highly trained lawyers and legal institutions in society. He pictured these great legal achievements as only a façade, behind which a severe perversion of these great ideas could be hidden, namely the gruesome tyranny of the increasingly mentally unstable Emperor Domitian and his bullish cronies. In this “parallel reality” of Domitian’s reign, Tacitus witnessed the disappearances and deaths of many of his senatorial colleagues, including his adored father-in-law Julius Agricola, the conqueror of the British Isles (who died by poisoning). Even Tacitus himself just narrowly escaped death. And after Domitian’s death in 96 AD, Tacitus the historian spent a good two decades exploring the now mostly lost archives of the Roman Senate and many other historical sources that were available to him at the time. In his historical works, he describes and analyses the events of previous centuries, throughout the whole history of Rome, and even further back to the (now also mostly lost) data on the history of ancient Greece and Egypt. One of the results of this meticulous endeavour to explore and understand the undercurrents of history was his final work called the “Annals”, finished in the year 116 AD. Near the end of the Annals, and also near the end of his rather eventful life under altogether 11 emperors, Tacitus coined an astonishingly intriguing conclusion to his historical analysis of the ways of the world, exclaiming:
“Plurimae leges corruptissima republica”
(Tacitus, Annals, Book III, Chapter 27)
This observation of Tacitus is usually translated into modern English as “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state,” but it could also be interpreted the other way around. Either way, in the historical exploration of his past, Tacitus has clearly detected many states and societies in which the blown-out, hypertrophic legal systems deviated from profane reality to the point that those states and societies finally collapsed due to the uprisings of the oppressed, simple implosion, perhaps due to societal lethargy, or a combination of them all. Such a fate ultimately also befell the Roman Empire and has recurred many times in history, both before Tacitus and after him. One such occurrence of the rebellion of the oppressed was already described in the first part of this trilogy on the killing of lawyers:
“With his grotesque picture of Cade’s rebels chasing the Latin-speaking people with ink stains on their fingers through London, Shakespeare had, of course, not been describing something happening only in the times around 1450. Oppression by too many and too complicated words and systems degenerated into alienated, fake structures and institutions are one of the most recognisable mainstays of human history. And so are rebellions and (real or just mental) revolutions against them.”
The passage found its way into the first part of this trilogy as just a quickly conceived and equally swiftly articulated intuition. But further reflection and some reactions have opened up, it seems, a whole world of largely unexplored terrain. One of the most surprising reactions to the story of Jack Cade, and of its reflection on old as well as modern times, came from my grammar school classmate, now a high-ranking Catholic priest:
“This reminds me of the Bible. During the times of the Old Testament, there were so many regulations, commandments, and prohibitions (not that many, only 613, of which 248 were commandments and 365 prohibitions), that they could no longer see their way out. Then Jesus came and asked what the fundamental commandments were and reduced everything to just three: love of God, love of oneself, and love of one’s neighbour.”
Although my former classmate and I did not discuss this again subsequently, it is perfectly clear that the story of Jesus Christ and his teachings is also the – rather universal – story about the subsequent distortion of those three clear commandments into lengthy scholastic conglomerates of bloated theories and dogmas. In the case of the (now Saint) Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, for instance, this evolution ended up with a treatise of over 3,000 pages called “Disputationes de Controversiis” (1596). Not much later, these grandiose doctrines, especially on papal infallibility as well as on every other possible theological issue of the time, directly enabled the same Saint Robert to expose opponents of these official doctrines in the role of papal grand inquisitor, and eventually burn a great number of “heretics” on the stake. Among them were Giordano Bruno, almost also Galileo Galilei, and a great number of other lesser-known original thinkers of the time.
The list of rebels against the above-mentioned oppressions is also rather long. Apart from already mentioned Jack Cade, this list includes at least (a bit less unlucky) Martin Luther and Voltaire, as well as, metaphysically, also (more unlucky) Josef K. of Franz Kafka. The events in Slovenia in the years around 1945 also seem to fit into the category of rebellions against the “oppression by too many and too complicated words and systems, degenerated into alienated fake structures and institutions.” What was happening at that time was primarily the uprising of Slovenes against the Nazi occupiers, with a communist revolution quite certainly hidden somewhere behind. But, starting well before the Nazis, all of this was the endeavour of predominantly younger people with more liberal views, who were oppressed or at least lacked prospects under the depressing, impenetrable, and bureaucratised ultra-Catholic state, society, and property rules. After the victory this uprising particularly targeted, among other things (and people), the existing property, capital, and bureaucratic structures and formalisms of the previous “broken world of injustice” (to borrow freely from the song The Internationale). One of the most telling testimonies about the events in 1945 is from the castle of Slovenska Bistrica in the north of Slovenia. Immediately after the winning Reds sent the castle owners to the Slovenian gulag (where they all disappeared):
“the systematic plundering of the castle began; everything was taken to Ljubljana, and according to records still preserved today, the first item confiscated was a typewriter.”
With the only difference being the technical progress from the hated pen and ink to the later equally hated typewriter, these events are strikingly identical to those of Jack Cade’s rebellion from six centuries before. The rather Luddistic treatment of private property by the landless winners of the Slovene revolution of 1945 was also not far from what Shakespeare was depicting. Some still-existing accounts (or, at least, stories) state that, shortly after the Reds captured the city, Ljubljana’s whole land registry was loaded onto (many) trucks destined for the Količevo paper mill for shredding. This intended destruction of the real property registrars, meticulously maintained for almost two centuries, was reportedly averted only at the very last moment by one of the more foresighted Partisan officials.
The continuation of events was not so much a Jack Cade story but rather something akin to the above-depicted transition from only three commandments of Jesus Christ (as understood by my priestly former classmate) to the verbose treatise of 3,000 pages written and put to its horrible use by St. Robert Bellarmine, the grand inquisitor (as understood by me). By the end of 1946, the new authorities had adopted the concise and manageable first Constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, comprised of 126 relatively short and clear articles. This was followed in 1963 by the next Constitution of already 237 significantly longer articles. The subsequent and final Yugoslav Constitution of 1974 already included 409 articles of considerably more complex text. But the culmination of this path to nirvana, or wherever else, was the Law on United Labour (Zakon o združenem delu, or ZZD), enacted in 1976. This was a mega-logorrheic legal document with 609 long articles divided into altogether many thousands of lengthy paragraphs, and with provisions of a hundred or even several hundred words in one sentence (for just a glimpse into this madness, see here, Article No. 2 of ZZD consisting of one sentence of 397 words).
This United Labour legislation represented the culmination of the concept of socialist self-management of the means of production, initially perhaps conceived in pure heart as an alternative to the evidently flawed capitalist system. But within a couple of decades, this system degenerated into what in 1976 already looked like the irrational somnambulistic illusions of aging socialist leaders.
This United Labour legislation represented the culmination of the concept of socialist self-management of the means of production, initially perhaps conceived in pure heart as an alternative to the evidently flawed capitalist system. But within a couple of decades, this system degenerated into what in 1976 already looked like the irrational somnambulistic illusions of aging socialist leaders. However, in the reality of recipients’ (and victims’) lives, this system was a matter of extreme seriousness, almost as deadly as the systems and concepts of absurdities mocked by Jan Hus many centuries earlier. Afterwards, these grand theories of the old communist veterans led to the complete turnaround of both the economy and society. In the process, the entirely new economic entities, then (and never later) known by fancy shortenings as TOZD, SOZD, SIS, etc., had to be devised and legally recorded. To do so, lengthy and incomprehensible so-called general self-management acts were written for each and every one of them, and procedures to resolve each and every relation between them needed to be devised and regulated as well. The task had been duly accomplished, but according to the calculations of Professor Bilandžić of Zagreb (see here, page 712), the implementation of the ZZD law produced no less than between 1,300,000 and 1,500,000 various general self-management acts in the last decade of the socialist state alone.
Had he been able to observe matters regarding socialist self-management in Slovenia (and the rest of ex-Yugoslavia), Tacitus the historian would have probably been astonished to find such a fitting embodiment of his maxim of an enormous multitude of highly complicated legal regulations as a sign of a corrupt and doomed state and society. As very much in line with his observations, Tacitus could have also found a socialist self-management society in which, as in Rome in the times of Domitian, the grandiose legalistic façade was hiding some entirely other, different, and quite malignant “parallel reality”. The meticulously regulated legal and economic system, in which self-managing workers were said to have been in command of their and the state’s affairs, namely, never actually functioned as proclaimed. The envisaged decision-making rights of the self-managing people were entirely and continuously suppressed by the existing malignant reality, namely by the “parallel system” of autocratic decision-making by the Communist Party, aided if necessary by some of its more specialised highly repressive sub-organisations.
At the end of the day the pleonastic and verbose system of socialist self-management, of course, collapsed. However, it did not collapse by being kicked out by the resistance of rational individuals against decades of irrational legal absurdities. Rather, the reasons were mainly economical. According to another of Professor Bilandžić’s calculations, an enormous nine billion working hours (9,000,000,000, so nine with nine zeroes !!) were spent and lost in various self-management rituals, such as legally mandated multi-hour assemblies of all factory workers on factory grounds. Not long after the collapse of the socialist self-management system, the following economic analysis of what had happened was given (see here, pages 712, 713):
“The hyperproduction of regulations and the gargantuan administrative superstructure led to the paralysis of the economy, with the annual rate of industrial growth tumbling down from 13% to zero within a decade […], and a third of the basic organisations of associated labour failed to achieve even simple reproduction, generating no accumulation on capital whatsoever.”
When establishing the laws of the newly created independent Slovenian state around 1990, its creators were, of course, well aware of the recent experience of the millions of inflated words in an empty and ineffective legal system. It would have been extremely undesirable by any rational architect of the new Slovenian state and its legal system to succumb (again) to this or the like. Initially, it really was so; aversion to socialist legal verbosity was clearly evident from the records of the Constitutional Commission, which drafted the Constitution for the first independent Slovenian state around 1990, as well as from the testimonies of the people involved. The most influential of them, later the first president of the Constitutional Court, recalled the following:
“We endeavoured to ensure that, unlike the ideologically driven Kardelj constitution of the past, the new constitution would be concise, clear, and explicit.”
As a result, the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia emerged as an extremely rational and coherent legislative text. Such an approach is (still) reflected in the laws and regulations from approximately the first decade of the independent state’s existence. But it did not last long. As calculated earlier in this trilogy, in just three decades the Slovenian legislature filled the Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia with over a quarter of a million pages of laws and other regulations. The legal texts have become increasingly unclear, incoherent, and indigestible, even for experts. Developments were – and, sadly, still are – almost manic: changes of laws occur not just after the changes of government or a minister, but also just because of some personnel shift within the working group responsible for a certain law, after every adopted or amended EU regulation or directive, also after every judgment of some of the European courts, even merely when somebody decided to press an issue as a (legal) “scandal” through the media. Consequently, for example, the Insolvency Act was amended, supplemented or repealed 24 times in 16 years, at the end becoming a logically confused legal cloaca of 332 pages just of the law’s text. The Companies Act has altogether been altered as much as 35 times, even a relatively obscure law on salaries in the public sector underwent 29 changes and amendments in two decades of its existence. With the example of one provision from the EU Directive on VAT, which consists of 92 highly incomprehensible self-contradicting words in one sentence, and with calculating the relevant bulk of the said directive to over 1,000 pages, already in the first part of this trilogy similar logorrheic and hypertrophic “achievements” were demonstrated for our broader homeland. To this could be added the recently adopted EU Regulation on artificial intelligence on 459 pages, evidently too long and too complex to ever really be used, the equally at first sight non-workable EU Directive on energy performance of buildings on 80 pages, and so on and so forth in hundreds of examples of similarly indigestible legislation.
The production of the judicial branch of the government has been corresponding to this hypertrophy of legislative activity. The current number of officially published judgments and other decisions issued by the Slovene courts of law has by now reached 222,851, on altogether well over a million pages of the so promulgated judicial law. And all this just in the legal area of less than half percent of Europe. So by taking into account also the other 99.5% of Europe, and the common legal system in which not just the European but also the national courts have to interpret and use the EU regulations and directives, we land in the area of tens of thousands of pages of relevant legal literature on more or less every serious legal issue …
There is no doubt that the situation with the Tacitan style plurimae leges is, in the modern world, much worse than at any time and place in the past. The production of logorrheic texts is currently infinitely easier and more effective than in the old times, when one of the rare sufficiently educated monks from some distant monastery needed to be employed to manually write just one copy on very expensive Chinese parchment. The task in question was also hard and expensive in the slightly nearer socialist self-management times, when, to reach the huge demands for logorrheic texts, very many suitably skilled (and indoctrinated) people, plus thousands of standard typewriters and manually rolled cyclostyle machines, were needed. Conversely, nowadays one needs only to find a clever and badly, if at all, paid law student or probationer, skilled in googling millions of data points in some of the thousands or so available law databases and experienced in using the copy-paste function, OCR technology, Google translate, and maybe also some AI to rub the edges and blur the source traces. By using this kind of “modern law equipment” one can – voila! – in a very short time and with almost no expenses get a hundred-page-long legislation proposal or a litigation writ or appeal, good enough to force the court to spend another hundred pages to properly respond in the judgment. In consequence, this produces “the court practice” to be referred to the next time by our or somebody else’s googling law student, and so on and around and multiplied in thousands or maybe millions of continued iterations.
A more detailed dissection of these rather nightmarish legal aspects of our modern “age of copypasteability”, the reasons behind them, and potential ways out are to be the focus of the third part of this trilogy. But all this may not even be worth the effort, for the “solution” could not come from within but from outside. Namely, it looks as if we are already on the verge of another wave of anti-lawyer Luddism, as described above for the years 1450 or 1945. This is possibly coming in the modernised form of a guy from South America with bushy hair repairing legal complications by wielding a chainsaw (motor axe), or of another one from a bit further up north and closer to us who would simply and effectively fire a quarter of a million employees – without complicating things with legal mumbo jumbo on the supposed human rights of the affected workers …
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About the title of the essay: Publius Cornelius Tacitus: Annals, Book III, Chapter 27. Published in 116 AD. English translation: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Photo: Flickr.