Give Every Law an Expiration Date

All local laws should expire after 10 years unless Council explicitly renews them. Obsolete laws disappear. Politicians vote on what still matters.

Expired yogurt in a refrigerator

Atlanta, Georgia reportedly has a law making it illegal to tie your giraffe to a lamppost. It is widely reported to still be on the books.

The point is not the giraffe. The point is that the system never cleans itself.

Modern law is cumulative: it has an input function, but almost no removal function. Software solves this with garbage collection, a system that periodically deletes unused code so the program does not collapse under its own weight. Government never built a garbage collector.

Philadelphia has one too: Section 5-900, in place since the 1951 Charter consolidated the 1919 Act and the 1929 Administrative Code, mandates the Director of Finance, Auditing Department, Revenue Commissioner, and City Treasurer be housed adjacent to each other. It made sense when financial records were paper. It survives only because no one revisits it.

Government can add rules. Deleting them is impossible. No press release for code cleanup. No candidate campaigns on "I deleted seventeen outdated regulations." So the stack grows. Layer upon layer. Many ordinances are older than everyone currently serving.

Without a removal mechanism, law inevitably accumulates faster than it can be understood.

The fix: all local laws expire after 10 years. Renewal requires a recorded vote, creating a visible audit trail for every law that continues to exist. Silence equals expiration.

  • Automatic cleanup: Obsolete laws disappear unless actively justified.
  • Forced accountability: Useful laws must be defended in the present tense, not passed in 1986 and forgotten.

Laws are like yogurt in a fridge. They go bad after a while, and should be periodically tossed out.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

Section 5-900: Philadelphia Home Rule Charter, Chapter 9 (Department of Public Property and Its Departmental Commissions), § 5-900(a)(1). Codified in the 1951 Charter; the section's own source note credits the Act of June 25, 1919, P.L. 581, and the Administrative Code of 1929, P.L. 177. The current office names are Director of Finance, Auditing Department, Revenue Commissioner (heading the Department of Collections), and City Treasurer.

Atlanta giraffe law: The Atlanta giraffe-tieing provision is widely cited as a “crazy law still on the books” (e.g., AJC, Secret Atlanta). No source confirms active codification in the current Atlanta Municipal Code. The “reportedly” hedge is doing the work; the “still on the books” framing is the article's, not a primary citation.

The proposal: This article is a thesis pitch, not a researched policy brief. The 10-year sunset horizon is more aggressive than the longer horizons floated elsewhere in the Living Code series; that difference is editorial, not an error.