No Stupid Questions

Germany has a website containing all its statutes: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ However, even Germans have difficulty understanding some of the paragraphs, as they are written in bureaucratic and legal language. Have fun!

I know there is a website either government or privately maintained with a reasonably recent law text.

I'm sure the library could lend me a copy of the laws if I asked.

Korea: literally that https://law.go.kr/

It even has English translations and an AI chatbot

"Oh... It's not illegal? Maaaaan... Now I gotta figure out something else to do this Saturday. 😮‍💨"

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ - For the UK.

Not sure why people are saying the laws aren’t accessible in America

Here’s the entire federal code of laws

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text

Here’s the federal rules and regulations

https://www.ecfr.gov/

Here’s a repository of every state’s laws

https://law.justia.com/codes/

In the US, no. This is why lawyers get paid so much money to research and analyze whether their clients’ activities may or may not be legal. For many areas of the law, relevant statutes, regulations, and agency interpretations are publicly available and may be compiled and discussed at a high level in a treatise. However, a specific question or set of facts (such as raccoon husbandry in a specific location) would require research or analysis beyond what a treatise might describe. And treatises are expensive, full of legal jargon, and usually not publicly available. Welcome to the Law!

From the wiki article on Public.Resource.Org:

Malamud called for increased awareness that Westlaw was a commercial broker of the United States Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and Federal Appendix. While Westlaw had been adding value to the content by indexing it with their proprietary West American Digest System and accompanying summaries, the purchase of their products was the only way to access much of the public domain material they hosted.

New Zealand here. Yes, public libraries have the many volumes of the legal code in the reference section.

I know Canada has the Canadian Criminal Code. My friend had a copy for college and I leafed through it once to read some laws about weapons. It's all in one big book so it is relatively accessible to find stuff but it obviously doesn't cover traffic law, provincial, or municipal laws.

I would be surprised if there was a country that don't have their all laws set in the paper form.

But, regarding Finland: You're thinking of http://finlex.fi/ .

There's for example this gem, telling about how you should take care of the hops trellis the law requires you to maintain! :)
(Please don't tell anyone, but I do not actually have a hops trellis! I'm breaking the law.)
It's also helpful if you want to know how to let your pigs to run in an acorn forest. Or if your bees escape and land inside someone else's tree.

Also, the beginning words of our Criminal Code are a bit, well, outdated? Here goes: https://www.finlex.fi/en/legislation/1889/39-001?language=swe&highlightId=798156&highlightParams=%7B%22type%22%3A%22BASIC%22%2C%22search%22%3A%22rikoslaki%22%7D

(I'm linking the Swedish-language versions because I believe a machine translator does a better job translating to European languages from Swedish than from Finnish)

Going to a law library and asking a librarian should help you get information. They get asked oddball questions often so no judgement.

Directly answering the question: no, not every country has such a consolidated library that enumerates all the laws of that country. And for reasons, I suspect no such library could ever exist in any real-life country.

I do like this question, and it warrants further discussion about laws (and rules, and norms), how they're enacted and enforced, and how different jurisdictions apply the procedural machine that is their body of law.

To start, I will be writing from a California/USA perspective, with side-quests into general Anglo-American concepts. That said, the continental European system of civil law also provides good contrast for how similar yet different the "law" can be. Going further abroad will yield even more distinctions, but I only have so much space in a Lemmy comment.

The first question to examine is: what is the point of having laws? Some valid (and often overlapping) answers:

• Laws describe what is/isn't acceptable to a society, reflecting its moral ideals
• Laws incentivize or punish certain activities, in pursuit of public policy
• Laws set the terms for how individuals interact with each other, whether in trade or in personal life
• Laws establish a procedure machine, so that by turning the crank, the same answer will output consistently

From these various intentions, we might be inclined to think that "the law" should be some sort of all-encompassing tome that necessarily specifies all aspects of human life, not unlike an ISO standard. But that is only one possible way to meet the goals of "the law". If instead, we had a book of "principles" and those principles were the law, then applying those principles to scenarios would yield similar result. That said, exactly how a principle like "do no harm" is applied to "whether pineapple belongs on pizza" is not as clear-cut as one might want "the law" to be. Indeed, it is precisely the intersection of all these objectives for "the law" that makes it so complicated. And that's even before we look at unwritten laws.

The next question would be: are all laws written down? In the 21st Century, in most jurisdictions, the grand majority of new laws are recorded as written statutes. But just because it's written down doesn't mean it's very specific. This is the same issue from earlier with having "principles" as law: what exactly does the USA Constitution's First Amendment mean by "respecting an establishment of religion", to use an example. But by not micromanaging every single detail of daily life, a document that starts with principles and is then refined by statute law, that's going to be a lot more flexible over the centuries. For better/worse, the USA Constitution encodes mostly principles and some hard rules, but otherwise leaves a lot of details left for Congress to fill in.

Flexibility is sometimes a benefit for a system of law, although it also opens the door for abuse. For example, I recall a case from the UK many years ago, where crown prosecutors in London had a tough time finding which laws could be used to prosecute a cyclist that injured a pedestrian. As it turned out, because of the way that vehicular laws were passed in the 20th Century, all the laws on "road injuries" basically required the use of an automobile, and so that meant there was a hole in the law, when it came to charging bicyclists. They ended up charging the cyclist with the criminal offense of "furious driving", which dated back to an 1860s statute, which criminalized operating on the public road with "fury" (aka intense anger).

One could say that the law was abused, because such an old statute shouldn't be used to apply to modern-day circumstances. That said, the bicycle was invented in the 1820s or 1830s. But one could also say that having a catch-all law is important to make sure the law doesn't have any holes.

Returning to American law, it's important to note that when there is non-specific law, it is up to the legislative body to fill those gaps. But for the same flexibility reasons, Congress or the state or tribal legislatures might want to confer some flexibility on how certain laws are applied. They can imbue "discretion" upon an agency (eg USA Department of Commerce) or to a court (eg Superior Court of California). At other times, they write the law so that "good judgement" must be exercised.

As those terms are used, discretion more-or-less means having a free choice, where either is acceptable but try to keep within reasonable guidelines. Whereas "good judgement" means the guidelines are enforced and there's much less wiggle-room for arbitraryness. And confusingly so, sometimes there's both a component of discretion and judgment, which usually means Congress really didn't know what else to write.

Some examples: a District Attorney anywhere in California has discretion when it comes to filing criminal charges. They could outright choose to not prosecute person A for bank robbery, but proceed with prosecuting person B for bank robbery, even though they were working together on the same robbery. As an elected official, the DA is supposed to weigh the prospects of actually obtaining a guilty verdict, as well as whether such prosecution would be beneficial to the public or a good use of the DA office's limited time and budget. Is it a bad look when a DA prosecutes one person but not another? Yes. Are there any guardrails? Yes: a DA cannot abuse their discretion by considering disallowed factors, such as a person's race or other immutable characteristics. But otherwise, the DA has broad discretion, and ultimately it's the voters that hold the DA to account.

Another example: the USA Environmental Protection Agency's Administrator is authorized by the federal Clean Air Act to grant a waiver of the supremacy of federal automobile emissions laws, to the state of California. That is to say, federal law on automobile emissions is normally the law of the land and no US State is allowed to write their own laws on automobile emissions. However, because of the smog crisis in the 70/80s, the feds considered that California was a special basket-case and thus needed their own specific laws that were more stringent than federal emissions laws. Thus, California would need to seek a waiver from the EPA to write these more stringent laws, because the blanket rule was "no state can write such laws". The federal Clean Air Act explicitly says only California can have this waiver, and it must be renewed regularly by the EPA, and that California cannot dip below the federal standards. The final requirement is that the EPA Administrator shall issue the waiver if California requests it, and if they qualify for it.

This means the EPA Administrator does not have discretion, but rather is exercising good judgement: does California's waiver application satisfy the requirements outlined in the Clean Air Act? If so, the Administrator must issue the waiver. There is no allowance of an "i don't wanna" reason for non-issuance of the waiver. The Administrator could only refuse if they show that California is somehow trying to do an end-run around the EPA, such as by trying to reduce the standards.

The third question is: do laws encompass all aspects of everything?. No, laws are only what is legally enforced. There are also rules/by-laws and norms. A rule or by-law is often something enforced by something outside the legal system's purview. For example, the penalty for violating a by-law of the homeowner's association might be a revocation of access to the common spaces. For a DnD group, the ultimate penalty for violating a rule might be expulsion.

Meanwhile, there are norms which are things that people generally agree on, but felt were so commonplace that breaking the norm would make everything else nonfunctional. For example, there's a norm that one does not use all-caps lock when writing an online comment, except to represent emphasis or yelling. One could violate that norm with no real repercussions, but everyone else would dislike you for it, they might not want to engage further with you, they might not give you any benefit of the doubt, they may make adverse inferences about you IRL, or other things.

TL;DR: there are unwritten principles that form part of the law, and there's no way to record all the different non-law rules and social norms that might apply to any particular situation.

The UK has https://www.legislation.gov.uk/

It only covers statute law, not common law, but most things are codified by statute today.

So generally the national laws are well documented as to what's a crime and what's not. Often there's a website.

Civil vs. Common law jurisdiction matters a fair bit. (As a gross simplification), in a civil law country that text is supposed to be the be-all end-all, judges are supposed to interpret cases based on whether the text of the law was followed or not and use their own discretion on whether past decisions should influence an active case. In common law jurisdictions, precedence from past cases matter a lot, and those decisions are cited by lawyers to say why it should be the same judgment or reasons why this case is different than previous to judge differently.

Then you have sub-national (state, province, prefecture) laws. Those will be well defined but their free availability from an official source online may vary.

Local by-laws will also depend on the location, they have less money so it may not be readily available digitally.

Some governments delegate rulemaking in specific areas, industries or fields to an internal ministry/department, to a professional body (engineers, doctors, lawyers etc.), or an organization (HOA, non profits). They are usually authorized by the law to set, modify, and enforce rules in that specialized area, with a maximum penalty they are permitted to give out for infractions.

So there's no book of all rules everywhere that can be searched that apply to a specific area.

Certainly, most civilized countries offer this, eg in Germany: recht.bund.de or dejure.org. You can also find it on Amazon Netherlands: Je vindt het Nederlandse wetboek en alle actuele wet- en regelgeving gratis en officieel online op 

wetten.overheid.n

Switzerland has Fedlex. For example here's the constitution.

Women: exists

Taliban: "Wait, that's illegal"

France, here is what I found:

Code civil and code pénal. I'm not a lawyer but code civil should be for small stuff where you have to agree on something or pay a fine, and code pénal for big stuff like killings and shit and you can go to prison.

There is also a "code de la route" which is another bonus on how to behave in the road.

• https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/texte_lc/LEGITEXT000006070721/
• https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/texte_lc/LEGITEXT000006070719/
• https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/texte_lc/LEGITEXT000006074228/

But it's France and I'm sure there are a billion other papers like those, but those 3 (civil, pénal, and route) are the most famous.

Edit: there was supposedly a project to put the laws in source form, and maybe a DSL for the tax law, here is is an example: https://www.data.gouv.fr/reuses/les-lois-francaises-versionnees-avec-github/, and taxes https://mlanguage.github.io/mlang/mlang/index.html