failure family

rule obsolescence and ossification

97 claims across 37 works.

• geography-based-test-obsolescence: Morrison's transactional test could prove relatively short lived because it is rooted in geography while an increasing number of securities transactio
• path dependency blocking liability reform: Cost increases and path dependencies may make it nearly impossible to relax the close to insurmountable standard for liability in oversight cases.
• reforms fitted only to the crisis at hand: Governance adjustments are often enacted merely to address the problem perceived in the given market environment and the then existing economic condit
• obsolescence of stable rules in evolving markets: The economic conditions and the corresponding requirements for optimal and stable rules are constantly evolving, so rules fixed at one moment lose the
• cost of perpetual rule revision: A regulatory framework that relies exclusively on stable and presumptively optimal rules cannot adequately address future challenges, and the amendmen
• reactive rule obsolescence: Rules established in reaction to financial crises inevitably fail to soften, curtail, or preempt the effects of financial crises, because reactive rul
• cyclical rulemaking cost: The cyclical nature of public rulemaking under incomplete information and bounded rationality is costly and produces suboptimal regulatory outcomes wi
• inevitable regulatory contraction: The regulatory expansion that follows crises inevitably leads to amendments, revisions, and retractions of the previously established rules.
• self-reinforcing suboptimal institutional arrangements: Rules with suboptimal characteristics are themselves the product of institutional arrangements and reinforce those suboptimal institutional arrangemen
• decay of optimal governance solutions over time: Even institutional arrangements that produce optimal governance solutions generate solutions that become suboptimal over time, necessitating rule revi
• non-adaptable rules entrench suboptimal institutions: Rules that lack adaptability to future states of the world reinforce the very institutions and processes that produce suboptimal outcomes.
• instability of optimal regulatory solutions: NIE acknowledges that transaction costs, imperfect information, and bounded rationality influence the rulemaking process, with the consequence that ev
• retrospective-only learning in rulemaking: In the conventional NIE learning process, the requirements for rules and their adaptability to future states become clear only after stable and presum
• cost and infeasibility of postponed rulemaking: The learning process in incomplete contract theory can be improved because experimentation with different rules, rule revision, and additional rulemak
• decay of presumptively optimal rules: Because transaction costs, imperfect information, and bounded rationality shape the rulemaking process, even solutions that are optimal at enactment b
• costly and ineffective ex post experimentation: Experimentation with different rules under the current framework of stable rulemaking carries substantial costs of rule revision and enactment, and th
• self reinforcing stable rule framework: The existing framework of stable and presumptively optimal rules is self reinforcing: it perpetuates rulemaking processes that produce stable presumpt
• shortcomings are internal to the framework: The shortcomings of the existing rulemaking framework cannot be adequately addressed from within that framework, because its structure rests on the as
• reactive backward looking correction: Traditional forward looking corporate governance systems adopt backward looking perspectives only after stable and optimal rules have emerged as subop
• rulemaking ossification: Although the extent and causes of rulemaking ossification remain empirically uncertain, increased legal and evidentiary burdens on regulatory authorit
• stable rule bias: Rulemakers rely almost exclusively on stable and presumptively optimal rules meant to be permanent solutions, and that reliance ignores the ever chang
• contingency blindness of stable rules: An existing regulatory infrastructure built on stable and presumptively optimal rules is largely incapable of addressing the ever increasing unknown f
• courts as suspension system for change: The doctrine of stare decisis and judicial adherence to precedent decided decades or centuries earlier mean the court system is structurally a suspens
• self reinforcing suboptimal rulemaking: Rules operate as a feedback effect on the rulemaking process itself: rules with suboptimal characteristics result from institutional arrangements and
• Rulemaking ossification: Formal rulemaking is simply too time-consuming for an environment of disruptive innovation; the speed of product innovation alone makes formal rulemak
• Rule obsolescence before enactment: Because formal rulemaking takes months and often years, regulators are still processing the previous product launch while new products reach the marke
• Uniform stable-rule response: Despite their insufficient anticipatory capabilities and known downsides, stable and presumptively optimal rules remain the uniform response to percei
• Revision treadmill: The current process of rule revisions, amendments, and repeals used to correct the inevitable shortcomings of stable rules is costly and time-consumin
• Stable rules as root cause: The collective action problem of rulemaking, the problems of trial-and-error rulemaking, and the problems of regulatory cycles derive largely from the
• Unsustainable ex post trial and error rulemaking: Ex post trial and error rulemaking built on stable and presumptively optimal rules produces suboptimal regulatory outcomes that are no longer sustaina
• Category mismatch between technology and law: Disruptive innovative technology frequently does not fit the legal categories created by recalcitrant regulatory structures, so the classification pro
• Governance adjustment overload: If rulemakers cannot adequately protect their constituents through stable and presumptively optimal rules, then regulatory supplements that facilitate
• Rules obsolete on arrival: New regulations aimed at an innovative product can be obsolete before they are finalized.
• Deferred suboptimality correction cycle: Accepting suboptimal rules temporarily buys rule certainty and predictability but guarantees a later cycle of revision, amendment, and repeal, so rule
• Revision process cannot track innovation: The current process of rule revisions, amendments, and repeals used to fix the inevitable shortcomings of stable rules is costly, time consuming, and
• Self reinforcing suboptimal rulemaking loop: The existing framework for optimal rules is self reinforcing: it perpetuates rulemaking processes that produce more optimal rules requiring costly rev
• Rules obsolete before finalization: Formal rulemaking in the existing regulatory infrastructure is too time consuming, and the speed of product innovation frequently renders regulations
• Stable rules cannot absorb unknown future contingencies: The existing regulatory infrastructure, resting on stable and presumptively optimal rules, is largely incapable of addressing the unknown future conti
• persistent hierarchy framing: Even after recent reforms, the corporate governance framework remains framed in terms of hierarchy, which is why it fits poorly with looser and unmedi
• exhausted regulatory remedy: Adding more regulations, processes and procedures cannot restore confidence in institutions, because the traditional trust and cohesion mechanisms hav
• Slow centralized decision-making: A particular problem with old world centralized, hierarchical organizations is that their decision-making processes become slow, cumbersome and costly
• unmaintained-cost-reduction: Without evolutionary governance upgrades to blockchain protocols, the cost reduction that blockchain brings to the agency relationship cannot be maint
• static-rulemaking-mismatch: Facts based, ex post, trial and error rulemaking with stable and presumptively optimal rules is incompatible with the needs of decentralized systems,
• static-code-rules: Rulemaking via code is not itself a cure for static regulation, because coded solutions are subject to natural flaws such as bugs and cannot evolution
• static-rule-arbitrage: Static complex sets of DAO rules inevitably produce corruptive opportunistic gaming and arbitrage behavior, so effective DAO governance designs should
• unmaintained-cost-reduction: The basis of coded blockchain guarantees will itself evolve and require protocol upgrades, and without evolutionary governance upgrades the cost reduc
• static-rule-subversion: For any static set of rules in an infinitely repeated game using reputation stakes there is a way to subvert the rules for individual profit at the ex
• static-rules-are-gameable: For any static set of rules in an infinitely repeated game using reputation stakes, there is a way to subvert the rules for an individual's profit at
• static-rulebook-failure: No static set of rules can prevent the corruption that will eventually cause any stability design to fail, but a changing rule set administered by nim
• limits of legally created trust: Trust created by law is often limited because it is only indirectly democratically legitimized, inflexible, untimely, resistant to change, dependent o
• institutional slowness of representative democracy: Representative democracies in the early 2020s were slow and inflexible because of their constitutional and institutional infrastructure and their lega
• static rule gaming: Stable and presumptively optimal static or constitutional rules for DAO governance typically enable gaming and arbitrage opportunities, because ration
• ex ante rule obsolescence: Presumptively stable ex ante majoritarian rules are flawed because they are inevitably suboptimal in an environment that has evolved away from the con
• Static governance ossification: Decentralized governance must be dynamic and evolutionary, otherwise the system becomes centralized and brittle over time; most DAOs fail to accomplis
• static-rule-set-decay: Any set process or set of rules that can ever be designed will ultimately fail to secure a network for all time, so no static rule set can serve as th
• rigidity-induced-collapse: Strict letter of the law regimes, which the authors call protocol centralization, produce rigid and temporarily efficient hierarchies, but that same r
• loophole-arms-race: No static set of rules can perfectly reflect the will of a group without leaving loopholes that adversaries exploit to profit at the majority's expens
• eternal-static-ruleset: Impossibility results establish that no static set of rules can eternally sustain a DAO, which is why DAOs must be set up to run with a dynamic set of
• strategic-manipulation-of-static-rules: Given a process with static rules and finite, discrete execution, a sufficiently patient and clever minority can always corrupt the process and profit
• ossified-protocol: Any set of rules that can be designed will need amendment as the environment changes, and a network that relies eternally on a static rule set will in
• rule change rigidity: The absence of a governance process is especially dangerous for peer to peer platforms precisely because decentralized organizations find it extremely
• rule rigidity decay: The very explicit rules that unify a diverse group destabilize it over the longer term, because internal corruption and external change render a fixed
• Specialization brittleness: The more effective a centralized architecture becomes at solving its target problem, the more rigid and unforgiving it becomes; rigid architectures ar
• Purpose-built hierarchy outliving its purpose: The centralized hierarchy built by the Chinese Communist Revolution was extremely successful at the military goal it was designed for, but once the mi
• Rule erosion without unifying ideals: Without a transcendental spiritual or philosophical principle to unify a society, its rules erode as exceptions to the routine are discovered that imp
• Zombie Charity: Existing legal incentives in many jurisdictions produce so called Zombie Charities, with the consequence that donative intent often cannot be optimall
• Limits of legally created trust: Legally created trust is limited because it is only indirectly democratically legitimized, and is therefore arbitrary, inflexible, untimely, resistant
• Strengths-become-weaknesses under dynamism: Centralization is not the optimal organizational structure under highly dynamic conditions; the very features that make centralized hierarchies effici
• Rigidity-induced collapse into chaos: If a hierarchy becomes too rigid the organization inevitably fails and the result is a return to chaos, which is why revolutions recur as a cyclic pat
• Static rules cannot prevent corruption: No static set of logical rules can ever succeed in preventing corruption, which is the ultimate problem with relying on letter of the law governance i
• Rigidity breeding private capture of ignored opportunity: Rigidity generates corruption: because a rigid organization ignores new information incompatible with its structure, the unexploited value creates an
• Self-reinforcing rigidity spiral: Even where corruption is avoided, rigidity still leads centralized organizations to catastrophic ends, because failures push members to cling more fai
• Institutional lag of democratic structures: Western democracies still run on structures developed decades or centuries ago and have no formal interaction with the new data stream produced by mod
• formalization makes values manipulable: Transcendental values must remain transcendental, because once formalized too rigorously they become more manipulable: a clearly specified definition
• static rule obsolescence: Traditional AI governance frameworks fail because they rely on static, predefined rules that cannot adapt quickly enough to the pace of AI development
• hollow-sunset-review: Sunset provisions fail on their own terms when the mandated reviews are not conducted thoroughly, because laws then either expire or continue without
• deadline-driven-renewal: Deadline pressure inverts the intended effect of sunset provisions: the need to reassess and renew by a fixed date produces hasty decisions or the con
• tax-sunset-fiscal-illusion: Sunset provisions in tax law do not deliver fiscal restraint, because shifting baselines, exceptions to budget rules, and the difficulty of accurately
• symbolic-law-repeal-resistance: Legal garbage collection is blocked by politics rather than by analysis: outdated or redundant laws remain contentious when they carry symbolic import
• statutory-interdependence-ripple: Determining genuine obsolescence is hard because statutes are interconnected: an apparently redundant law may be a foundational element of another sta
• history-versus-cleanup-tradeoff: Legal garbage collection faces an unavoidable tradeoff: streamlining the legal framework by removing outdated laws must be balanced against preserving
• static-dao-governance: Treating DAOs as monitoring entities assumes a static governance model that cannot keep pace with the rapid proliferation and sophistication of AI age
• regulatory obsolescence: Policymakers who cling to Nashian ideals risk obsolescence, because the future demands governance that orchestrates agentic plenitude rather than gove
• obsolescence of remedial institutions: The author concedes that the institutions he previously advocated, including dynamic regulation, contingent capital, agile sandboxes and Web3 reputati
• digital feudalism: Continued reliance on scarcity based models, human centric institutions and twentieth century regulatory architectures risks not mere inefficiency but
• chronic-obsolescence-of-static-codes: Static codification is fundamentally incompatible with the governance needs of exponentially evolving digital technologies.
• ossification-of-large-scale-codifications: The UDLC's annual AI-assisted review and legal garbage collection obligations are core constitutional safeguards, not housekeeping, because ossificati
• rigidity-or-irrelevance-dilemma: The automated maintenance system is the UDLC's primary defense against the entropy that has rendered every previous attempt at universal private law e
• dead-letter-accumulation: Every large-scale legal order eventually accumulates dead-letter provisions, contradictory clauses and rules premised on obsolete technology; national
• Fossilization of legal relationships: Neither conflict of laws nor legal harmonization can supply a sustainable, systemic solution, because both approaches result in the fossilization of l
• static protocol arbitrage: No static citation protocol can eliminate all arbitrage opportunities for sufficiently patient and powerful actors, a conclusion the author draws from
• Obsolescence of Price and Quantity Controls: Price and quantity controls are not the operative policy levers in computative settings, because price no longer carries the coordinating information
• Tethered Revision Cycles: The delegated-acts and code-of-practice mechanisms in recent artificial-intelligence statutes are only partial steps toward dynamic regulation because
• Ceremonial Monetary Instruments: Monetary policy instruments become ceremonial under AI driven production, because central banks inject liquidity on schedules calibrated for scarcity
• Signaling Redundancy: Costly signaling through degrees, warranties, bonding, and credit scores becomes redundant when direct verification is instantaneous and free, and the
• NIE Governance Superfluity: The governance apparatus New Institutional Economics developed to counteract opportunism, including vertical integration, relational contracting, repu
• Static Rule Set Gamed: Any DAO operating a static rule set in a strategic environment with patient capital and high stakes faces the Folk-Theoretic prediction that the rule