The South Dakota Code Commission meets Wednesday at 2 p.m. at the Rapid City Ramkota to discuss the publication of South Dakota Codified Laws. On the agenda is the 2019 Pocket Part Growth Report, of which I have never heard until this morning.
The pocket parts are the annual supplements printed to the impressive tan and red main volumes Thomson West publishes for our lawyers and others for whom the electronic version of our statutes does not suffice. When the pages in a volume’s pocket part reach a quarter of the pages in the main volume, the Code Commission figures we should at least consider printing a new main volume. The 2019 Pocket Part Report shows nine volumes meet that criterion:
Those percentages don’t necessarily indicate that the Legislature has been most avidly tinkering with those particular titles of Codified Law. The pocket pages for the Insurance statutes, for instance, expanded by just nine pages across both volumes this year, while the Public Health and Safety pocket pages grew by 39 pages (curious: do you feel healthier or safer thanks to all that new verbage from Pierre?). The highest legal inflation appears in Volume 3, which contains Titles 3–5, on Public Officers and Employees; Public Fiscal Administration; and Public Property, Purchases, and Contracts. Just this year, Volume 3 is growing by 56 pocket pages, a 32% growth of the pocket pages and a 5.8% expansion of the total pages, main plus pocket. Title 16, Courts and Judiciary, is adding 48 pocket pages, but since that title has fewer main volume pages, that figure represents 6.4% growth from last year’s main plus pocket pages.
The 2019 Pocket Pages Report shows that South Dakota Codified Law, including the State Constitution, consists of 28,314 printed main volume pages and 4,883 pocket pages.
Codified laws are just more meaningless words when you want to steal something of value. The government (that would be us) makes a bill or a law and then shirks its responsibility to carry it out as was intended. Case in point, industrial hemp in the massive Farm Bill that was passed only because of this very law (See Kentucky and its senior senator’s push). Case in point Keystone XL.
https://www.indianz.com/News/2019/06/07/harold-frazier-keystone-xl-pipeline-thre.asp
Case in point, the War Powers Act. Codified law means little anymore in this rich man’s game that is getting worse. We should be ashamed of ourselves for allowing this, but in the United States, we are united in racism and misogyny only.
Why reprint? Save money and just toss them in the trash. With the GOP in charge, laws no longer apply. Court orders carry no weight. Heck, instead of doing away with the Energy Dept. and the Ed. Dept., why don’t we save money by doing away with the DOJ and the FBI? Yuge savings, bigly! :-(
If the “electronic version of our statutes does not suffice.”
Real lawyers know the hard copy code contains twice as much crucial info than cyber shortcuts contain. And libraries no longer maintain the expensive code books, supplemented, except USD law libraries (maybe NAU type colleges do.) The general public is not invited.
Feel free to correct this.
ALWAYS check the supp or you will definitely have imprecise legal knowlege, which is fatal.