Thomas Jefferson had an idea that never got built into the Constitution but probably should have: every law should expire. His specific proposal was that every constitution — every major piece of legislation — should sunset after about 19 years, roughly the span of one adult generation. His logic was simple: the earth belongs to the living, not the dead. One generation has no right to bind the next to its decisions permanently. Laws should have to earn their continued existence, not just persist through institutional inertia.
We didn't take him up on it. And now we live with the consequences — a legal and regulatory landscape littered with rules that made sense in their original context, encoded assumptions from decades or centuries ago, and now quietly shape modern life in ways most people never examine.
The clearest example is drug policy. The mandatory minimum sentencing laws that dominate American drug enforcement were passed primarily in the 1980s and 1990s — built on a specific set of assumptions about addiction (that it was a moral failing), about drug markets (that harsh sentences would deter supply), and about race (assumptions that, if not explicit, were deeply embedded in the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities). The science of addiction has been completely overhauled since then. The criminological evidence on deterrence has been extensively studied and found wanting — incarceration rates and drug use rates don't move together the way the theory predicted. And the racial disparities encoded into those sentencing structures have been documented exhaustively. Yet many of these laws remain on the books, largely because changing laws is hard and keeping them is easy.
This is not a left or right issue — it's a logic issue. Sunset provisions (the formal term for legislative expiration dates) already exist for some categories of law. The USA PATRIOT Act was written with sunset clauses that forced Congress to periodically reauthorize surveillance powers rather than let them accumulate indefinitely. Tax code provisions routinely expire and require renewal. The principle is established — we just apply it inconsistently.
The argument for broader sunset provisions is straightforward: knowledge changes, circumstances change, priorities change. A law written to address a 1970s problem with 1970s tools and 1970s understanding should not automatically apply to a 2020s world without anyone having to make the affirmative case for its continued relevance. Requiring periodic reauthorization doesn't make law unstable — it makes lawmaking accountable. It forces the question: does this still work? Does this still reflect what we actually believe and know?
The counterargument is real too — constant renewal cycles consume legislative bandwidth, and some good laws would get quietly sunsetted by hostile administrations. These are solvable design problems, not fatal objections. A default of "renew unless actively killed" versus "expire unless actively renewed" produces very different political dynamics, and the right design depends on what you're trying to protect.
But the core point stands: rules written by people who are now dead, based on science that has since been corrected, for a world that no longer exists, should not govern living people by default. Outdated rules don't just fail to help — they actively harm, because they consume resources, fill prisons, restrict possibilities, and crowd out better solutions that have developed in the meantime. The question is never just "was this law good when it was written?" The question is "is it good now?" And we almost never formally ask it.
Jefferson was right. Laws should have expiration dates. The living deserve laws written for the living.
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