Daniel sent us this one — he's been digging into Israeli tenant law, specifically the 1971 Tenant Protection Law, and he noticed something that honestly drives me up the wall too. What people call the "fair rental law" isn't actually its own statute. It's a nickname for a set of clauses that got bolted on in 2017. The original 1971 act has been amended so many times that figuring out what's actually enforceable means disentangling a web of amendments that reference other amendments, which reference annexes, which reference earlier versions of themselves. His question is basically: why do so many jurisdictions keep doing this — layering amendment on amendment — instead of just writing a clean new law and striking the old one? And second, which countries have actually made a serious effort to write legislation in plain language that a normal person can read without a law degree?
This is one of those things where the more you look at it, the more you realize the problem isn't laziness — it's structural. And it's everywhere. The United States Code, the UK statute book, the Israeli system Daniel's looking at — they all have this same pattern where you need a map and a flashlight to find what the law actually says today.
A map, a flashlight, and probably a subscription to a legal database that costs more than my annual leaf budget.
Which is exactly the point, right? The opacity isn't a bug — for some actors, it's a feature. But let me start with the mechanics. When a legislature amends a law, they're not editing a document. They're passing a new law that says "in Section 4, subsection B, replace the words 'twelve months' with 'eighteen months.'" That's literally what an amendment looks like.
You're reading the original 1971 statute, and it says twelve months, but you have to know that a 1983 amendment changed it to eighteen months, and then a 1999 amendment changed it to twenty-four, and then the 2017 clauses added a whole new condition that overrides the timeline if certain things happen.
None of that is reflected in the text you're looking at. What you're holding is a historical artifact with invisible modifications floating around it. In Israel, the situation is especially tangled because of the legal layering Daniel mentioned in that other context — you've got Ottoman law still on the books in some areas, British Mandate ordinances, and then the Knesset's own statutes layered on top. The 1971 Tenant Protection Law was itself a consolidation of earlier British-era rent control measures.
It was a clean-up effort that then became the thing that needed cleaning up. There's something almost poetic about that.
The 1971 law was passed during a housing crisis — massive immigration waves, not enough units, landlords had all the leverage. It imposed strict rent controls and gave tenants near-indestructible protected tenancy status. The 2017 amendments that Daniel's calling the "fair rental law" were an attempt to liberalize parts of it while keeping some protections. But here's the thing — the 2017 changes didn't replace the 1971 act. They amended specific sections. So now you have a statute where some clauses date to 1971, some to the 1980s, some to 2017, and they all cross-reference each other.
If you're a tenant trying to figure out whether your landlord can evict you, or a landlord trying to figure out whether you can raise the rent, you're not reading one law. You're reading a palimpsest.
That's exactly the word. A document where the old text is scraped away and new text written over it, but you can still see traces of what was there before. Except in law, the scraping isn't visible unless you know where to look.
Let's get to the core question. Why not just write a new law? Why not pass the Rental Law of 2026 that says "this replaces everything that came before" and have it be one clean document?
There are a few reasons, and they're different in different systems. The first is procedural. In a parliamentary system like Israel's or the UK's, amending an existing act is usually faster than introducing an entirely new bill. A new bill often requires multiple readings, committee referrals, public consultation periods. An amendment to an existing act can sometimes take a shorter path, especially if it's framed as technical or corrective.
The amendment route is the legislative equivalent of taking the side streets to avoid highway traffic.
And sometimes that's genuinely about efficiency — you want to fix something quickly, and you don't want to reopen debate on the entire framework. But sometimes it's about avoiding political fights. If you try to replace the 1971 law wholesale, every interest group shows up. Tenant unions want to expand protections. Landlord associations want to gut them. Constitutional questions get raised. It becomes a multi-year battle. But if you amend three clauses quietly, maybe nobody notices.
Until a decade later when nobody can read the law.
The second reason is legal continuity. Courts have spent decades interpreting the 1971 law. There's case law built around specific phrases, specific section numbers. If you repeal and replace, you create legal uncertainty — do the old precedents still apply? Judges hate this. Lawyers hate this. The system prefers the known mess to the unknown clean slate.
That's the "if it's stupid but it works" school of legislative drafting.
Except it doesn't work for the citizen. It works for the legal profession. And that's the third reason, which is less comfortable to talk about. Complex law creates a dependency on lawyers. If every rental agreement required a lawyer to interpret, that's a barrier to access, sure — but it's also a steady demand for legal services. I'm not saying legislators sit around scheming about this, but the bar associations in most countries don't exactly lobby for simpler laws.
There's a quote I half-remember — someone said that laws are written by lawyers for lawyers, and everyone else is just supposed to hire one.
It's not quite that cynical everywhere. But let me give you a concrete example of how bad this gets. The United States Internal Revenue Code is roughly two-point-six million words. The regulations interpreting it are about eight million words. Nobody — not the IRS commissioner, not the top tax attorney in the country — understands the whole thing. It's been amended so many times, with so many cross-references, that compliance is effectively an honor system with audit risk.
Two-point-six million words. For context, that's about ten times the length of "Infinite Jest.
"Infinite Jest" at least has footnotes that make sense if you read them in order.
What's the alternative? You mentioned some jurisdictions have tried to do this differently.
The country that's gone furthest is New Zealand. In the late nineteen-nineties, they undertook a complete rewrite of their statute book with a specific mandate: laws should be accessible, understandable, and written in plain language. They didn't just tweak the drafting style — they changed the entire legislative process. Every bill now goes through a Parliamentary Counsel Office that has explicit plain-language standards. They use you and we instead of "the aforementioned party." They break sentences that used to run for two hundred words into digestible chunks. They organize laws by what a person actually needs to know, not by the internal logic of the legal concepts.
Did it work? Can an average New Zealander actually read a rental law and understand their rights?
Better than in most places, yes. The Residential Tenancies Act of 1986 has been repeatedly amended, but each consolidation is published as a clean, readable document on a public website. The government runs a dedicated tenancy services site that explains rights in plain language backed by the actual statute. It's not perfect — no law is — but the gap between "what the law says" and "what a citizen can understand" is deliberately minimized.
So they've been at this for four decades. That's long enough to see whether the approach holds up.
It has, mostly. The New Zealand model influenced other Commonwealth countries. Australia has done significant work on plain-language drafting, particularly at the state level. Victoria's legislative counsel has published plain-English manuals and actively trains drafters. Canada has the Uniform Law Conference that pushes for clarity across provinces. The UK has the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, which since about twenty-ten has had an explicit "good law" initiative — the idea being that legislation should be clear, coherent, and accessible.
"Good law" — I appreciate that they felt the need to brand the concept of laws being readable as an initiative rather than, you know, the default.
The default in most systems is that laws are written for judges to interpret, not for citizens to read. Changing that default requires a conscious institutional commitment. And most jurisdictions haven't made it.
What about the United States? I feel like every time I hear about an American law, it's some multi-thousand-page monster that nobody read before voting on.
The US is interesting because it's fragmented. At the federal level, the plain language movement got a boost from the Plain Writing Act of twenty-ten, which requires federal agencies to use clear communication in public-facing documents. But that applies to agency communications — forms, notices, websites — not to the drafting of statutes themselves. Congressional bills are still drafted in that distinctive style that only committee staffers and lobbyists can parse.
The style where a single sentence can contain seventeen subordinate clauses and you forget what the subject was by the time you reach the verb.
The verb is "shall," which itself is ambiguous — does it mean "must" or "may" or "intends to"? Courts have spent centuries litigating that one word. But at the state level, there's been more experimentation. Oregon has a plain-language requirement for consumer contracts. Washington State has an office specifically reviewing agency rules for clarity. But no US jurisdiction has done what New Zealand did — a top-to-bottom rewrite of the statute book with the citizen reader as the primary audience.
New Zealand is the gold standard. You mentioned the UK's good law initiative.
The UK effort is worth digging into because it addresses exactly what Daniel's asking about — the amendment problem. One of the things the "good law" project did was push for what they call "Keeling schedules." That's a practice where, when you amend an act, you include a schedule showing what the act looks like after the amendment — the full text as it will read. So instead of just saying "in section five, replace 'twelve' with 'eighteen,'" you actually show section five as it will now exist.
That seems so obvious it's almost infuriating that it's not standard practice everywhere.
It is standard in some places, but not most. The European Union does something similar with codified versions of directives — when an amendment passes, the EU publishes a consolidated text. But that's an administrative act, not part of the legislative process itself. The Keeling schedule approach makes the clarity part of the law-making, not an afterthought.
The amendment says "here's what the law now says" rather than "here's what to change and good luck figuring out the result." That alone would solve a huge chunk of the problem Daniel's describing.
But Keeling schedules add cost and time to the drafting process. Someone has to produce the consolidated text, verify it's accurate, and that becomes part of the bill that needs to be debated and voted on. Legislatures with limited drafting resources — which is most of them — resist this.
We're back to resource constraints being the enemy of accessible law.
But let me push on something. Daniel's prompt assumes that the goal of legislation is to be read by citizens. Historically, that's not what statutes were for.
The modern idea that a citizen should be able to pick up a statute and understand their legal rights is maybe fifty or sixty years old. Before that, statutes were instructions to judges and officials. They were written in a specialized language because the audience was specialized. The Magna Carta wasn't written for the serfs — it was written for the barons and the king's courts. The idea that law should be accessible to the governed is a democratic innovation, and it's still not fully internalized in how laws are actually drafted.
We're dealing with the legacy of a system that never expected you to read it.
And that legacy is embedded in everything — the vocabulary, the structure, the amendment practices, the publication systems. Changing it means changing the institutional muscle memory of entire governments. New Zealand could do it partly because it's a small country with a unified legal system and a relatively young statute book. The UK has centuries of accumulated legislation. Israel has the Ottoman-British-modern layering. The United States has fifty-one separate jurisdictions plus federal. The complexity scales with the history.
Let me bring this back to the rental law specifically. Daniel's looking at the 1971 Israeli statute and the 2017 amendments and seeing a mess. What would a plain-language rental law actually look like?
A well-drafted accessible rental law would start with what the citizen actually needs to know: "This law applies if you rent a home in Israel. Here are your rights. Here are your obligations. Here's what your landlord can and cannot do." It would use tables, flowcharts, examples. The technical definitions would be in a glossary at the end, not in a forty-line sentence at the beginning. Amendments would be incorporated into the main text, with a version history available but not required reading.
Flowcharts in legislation. Herman, you're going to make some barrister somewhere very upset.
The South African constitution has flowcharts. It's not unprecedented. But the real innovation isn't formatting — it's the institutional commitment to consolidation. Every time a law is amended, a new official version is published within weeks that shows the complete current text. No citizen should have to do the archaeology themselves.
Which brings us to the second part of the prompt. How many jurisdictions have actually made substantive efforts on this?
I'd categorize them in tiers. Tier one — transformative effort — is New Zealand. They're the only country that has made plain-language legislative drafting a systematic, whole-of-government priority and sustained it for decades. Tier two — significant but incomplete — includes Australia, Canada, the UK, and South Africa. These countries have institutional plain-language offices, published standards, and visible improvements, but the effort is uneven across departments and levels of government. Tier three — targeted efforts — includes the United States at the federal agency level, several European countries for consumer protection laws specifically, and Singapore, which has done good work on making subsidiary legislation accessible.
Then tier four: everyone else, including Israel, where the law is a sedimentary deposit.
Israel's not alone there. Most countries fall into that category. But Israel has a particular challenge because of the legal layering from different sovereign eras, as Daniel's explored before. It's not just that laws are amended — it's that the foundational legal concepts come from different legal traditions. Ottoman property concepts, British common law, modern Israeli statutory innovation. When you amend a 1971 law that was itself built on a British Mandate ordinance that was built on Ottoman land categories, you're not just dealing with one amendment chain. You're dealing with three.
The legal equivalent of trying to renovate a building where the foundation is Ottoman, the walls are British, and the roof was added in the 1970s, and every renovation since has just added a new wing without ever looking at the wiring.
Now you want to know whether you're allowed to have a pet in the apartment, and the answer depends on a clause that references a regulation that was amended by a ministerial decree that cites a precedent from a court that no longer exists under its original name.
I'm not even a tenant and I'm stressed.
Let me offer a counterpoint to Daniel's frustration, because I think there's a genuine tension here. The amendment approach — messy as it is — preserves something valuable: legal stability. When you amend a law, the parts you don't touch continue to have the same judicial interpretations they always had. If you repeal and replace, even with identical language, you open the door to arguments that the legislature intended to change the meaning. That's not a theoretical concern — it's a real problem that affects real cases.
The mess is a feature for the people who litigate, and a bug for the people who just want to know the rules.
That tension is hard to resolve. The citizen wants clarity. The lawyer wants continuity. The legislator wants speed. The system defaults to whichever of those has the most institutional power, and in most places, the citizen's interest in clarity ranks third.
Which is why the New Zealand model is interesting. They didn't just say "make it clearer." They changed who the primary audience is. The law is written for the person who has to follow it, not the person who has to argue about it.
That's a political choice, not a technical one. It requires the legislature to value accessibility over convenience. Most don't.
What about technology? We're in an era where AI can parse legal text. Does that change the equation?
There are already tools that take messy amendment chains and produce consolidated versions automatically. The UK's legislation-dot-gov-dot-uk site does this — it shows you the current version of any act with all amendments incorporated, and you can toggle to see previous versions. That's a technical solution to a drafting problem. But it's a patch. The underlying text is still written in dense legalese. The consolidation tool tells you what the words are, not what they mean.
It solves the archaeology problem but not the comprehension problem.
And there's a danger in thinking technology fixes this. If you make it easy to see the consolidated text, legislators have even less incentive to draft clearly in the first place. Why bother when the computer will clean it up?
The legislative equivalent of "we'll fix it in post.
And post-production in law is done by citizens trying to figure out if they can be evicted.
Let me ask you something. You practiced medicine in Israel for years. You had to deal with healthcare regulations. Were they as bad as the rental laws?
Worse in some ways, better in others. The Ministry of Health puts out circulars that effectively amend regulations without going through the Knesset at all. So you have the law, plus the regulations, plus the circulars, plus the court decisions interpreting all three. And the circulars sometimes contradict each other because different departments issued them at different times. It's the same amendment-on-amendment problem, just with even less legislative oversight.
The opacity isn't unique to tenant law. It's systemic.
Systemic and, in some ways, deliberate. I don't mean conspiratorial — I mean that the system optimizes for certain outcomes. It optimizes for legal precision, for judicial administrability, for legislative speed. It does not optimize for citizen comprehension. And until citizen comprehension becomes a metric that legislators are evaluated on, it won't.
Are there any examples of citizen comprehension actually being used as a metric? Like, a government department being evaluated on whether people understand the rules?
The UK Cabinet Office has done some work on this — they've run user testing on guidance documents, watching real people try to navigate benefits applications and seeing where they get stuck. But that's guidance, not legislation. The actual law remains opaque even when the guidance is clear. And if the guidance contradicts the law — which happens — the law wins. So you can read a clear, simple explanation on a government website, follow it, and still be in violation of the actual statute.
That's almost worse. It's like giving someone a map that looks clear but has the roads in the wrong places.
There was a case in the UK a few years ago — a man followed HMRC's own guidance on a tax matter, got it wrong because the guidance didn't reflect a recent amendment, and the tribunal said "the guidance is not the law, you should have read the statute." The statute that was, of course, only available in unconsolidated form with amendments scattered across three different finance acts.
"You should have read the statute" is doing a lot of work there. It's technically correct and practically absurd.
Which is the motto of about half of administrative law.
What would you actually recommend? If you're a citizen in a jurisdiction that hasn't done a New Zealand-style clean-up, and you need to understand your rights under a law like the Tenant Protection Law — what do you do?
Practically speaking, you don't read the statute. You find a reliable secondary source — a tenants' rights organization, a government FAQ, a legal aid pamphlet. In Israel, there are nonprofits that produce plain-language guides to tenant rights. They do the archaeology for you. It's not ideal — secondary sources can be incomplete or outdated — but it's the best option in a system that wasn't designed for you.
Which is a pretty damning thing to say about a legal system in a democracy. "The system wasn't designed for you.
It's damning but accurate. And it's worth noting that some jurisdictions are actively trying to change this. The European Union's Better Regulation agenda includes accessibility as a principle. The OECD has published recommendations on plain-language drafting. There's a global movement here — it's just slow.
Slow like me, but with less napping and more committee meetings.
The committee meetings are probably why they need the naps.
So to pull this together — amendment layering persists because it's procedurally easier, politically quieter, and legally safer than repeal-and-replace. The jurisdictions that have broken out of this pattern are the ones that made a political decision to prioritize citizen comprehension and backed it with institutional resources. New Zealand leads. A handful of Commonwealth countries follow. Most of the world still operates on the palimpsest model.
The palimpsest model isn't going away. Even in countries with good plain-language practices, amendment layering still happens — they just clean up after themselves better. The difference between New Zealand and Israel isn't that New Zealand never amends laws. It's that New Zealand has a system for publishing consolidated versions promptly and writing clearly in the first place. Those are two separate interventions — consolidation and plain language — and you need both.
Consolidation so you can find the current text. Plain language so you can understand it when you do.
Neither happens by accident. Both require sustained institutional effort, which requires political will, which requires citizens to demand it. Most people don't know how bad their statute book is until they need to use it. And by then they're already in a dispute, stressed, and short on time. It's the worst possible moment to discover the system is illegible.
The moment you need the law to be clear is the moment you have the least capacity to navigate its unclarity. There's a genuine injustice in that.
And it's an injustice that disproportionately affects people without resources. If you can afford a lawyer, the mess is manageable — someone else does the archaeology. If you can't, you're navigating it alone. The opacity of the law is a regressive tax on legal rights.
That's the line of the episode right there. The opacity of the law is a regressive tax on legal rights.
I'll stand by that. And it connects to what Daniel's really asking. He's not just annoyed by messy drafting. He's pointing at a structural problem where the people who most need the law's protection are the people least able to decipher what it says.
Which brings us back to the Tenant Protection Law.
The 2017 amendments that were supposed to modernize it — the "fair rental law" — added new clauses that cross-reference the old clauses. So now you need to understand both the old framework and the new exceptions. It's more protection on paper, but it's also more complexity, and complexity is the enemy of access.
Daniel's suggestion — write a new law, take the old one off the books — starts to look less like a technical preference and more like a democratic necessity.
Though I'd add a note of caution. Some of the worst laws in history were "clean" new statutes that swept away messy accumulated protections. The messiness of the common law tradition — all those amendments and precedents and cross-references — is partly a reflection of incremental compromise. When you consolidate, you have to make choices about what to keep and what to discard. Those choices are political. A clean slate can be a blank check.
The amendment mess is also a record of democratic negotiation. Every layer is a compromise that someone fought for.
The 1971 law was a compromise between tenant advocates and property owners. The 2017 amendments were a different compromise reflecting a different housing market. If you wipe the slate and write a new law, you reopen every one of those negotiations simultaneously. That might produce a better law. It might produce a worse one. It will definitely produce a fight.
Which is why legislators prefer the amendment route. It keeps the fight contained.
The citizen is left with the archaeological dig. There's no perfect solution here. But there are better and worse practices. The better practices — consolidation, plain language, Keeling schedules, user testing — are known. They've been demonstrated to work. They're just not widely adopted because the people who benefit from them don't have lobbyists.
We've covered the why, the who, and the structural injustice. Any final thoughts before we wrap?
I think there's an open question about whether AI tools will change this. If you can point a language model at a messy statute and get a reliable plain-language summary, does that solve the problem? Or does it just create a new layer of intermediation that can be wrong in new ways?
That might be a whole episode on its own. For now, I think the takeaway is: if you're frustrated that you can't read the law, it's not you. The law wasn't written for you. And in a handful of places, people are trying to change that.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1880s, the largest cooking pot ever documented in Papua New Guinea was carved from a single trunk of ironwood by the Elema people of the Gulf Province — it measured over fourteen feet in length and was used to steam sago grubs for ceremonial feasts.
Fourteen feet of sago grubs. a lot of grub.
I have so many questions and I'm going to choose not to ask any of them.
What gives me some hope is that the plain-language movement is actually growing — the OECD, the EU, more countries every year are at least acknowledging that inaccessible law is a problem. The question is whether that acknowledgment turns into the kind of sustained institutional effort New Zealand mounted. That takes decades, and it takes citizens who keep demanding it.
In the meantime, if you're a tenant in Israel trying to understand your rights, find a tenants' rights organization. They've done the work. The law should be accessible, and until it is, the people who translate it are doing a public service.
This has been My Weird Prompts, with thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.If you've got a question about a law you can't decipher, send it our way — we'll do the archaeology together.
Or at least complain about it eloquently.
