Some Laws

(The descriptive kind, for once.)

RERUN NOTE: This is a repost from 2019. Since the majority of you discovered De Civitate in the past two years, it will be new to many of you—and many of the rest of you will not have seen the updates since 2019!

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I run into various laws on the Internet. Sometimes I have a hard time finding them again later. In this post, I will collect some of them, chiefly for my own reference, but also because several of them are funny. The list may grow over time.

Hofstadter's Law

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. (But see also.)

Johnson's First Law of Episcopal Thermodynamics

Every joke you make about the Episcopal Church eventually comes true.

Poe's Law

In writing, it is impossible to tell a parody of extremism apart from actual extremism.

(The original formulation was narrower.)

Parkinson's Law of Triviality (The Bicycle-Shed Effect)

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.¹

Jones's Bicycle-Shed Corollary

The more people understand something, the more willing they are to argue about it, and the more vigorously they will do so.

Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility

It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of LGBTQ rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.

This law deserves to be generalized from “Christians” and “LGBTQ rights,” because the central paradox applies in many contexts. For example, a couple years ago, I saw a lot of:

It’s a complete absurdity to believe that progressives will suffer a single thing from Elon Musk buying Twitter, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.

Although the Law of Merited Impossibility has never been formally extended beyond its original case, my view is that any statement of this general form invokes the Law of Merited Impossibility.²

Cargill's Law (The 90-90 Rule)

In any software development project, the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

Campbell's Law

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

UPDATE 30 September 2025: Since this article was first published in 2019, Campbell’s Law has been largely supplanted by Goodhart’s Law, which has doubled in popularity since early 2022 and gained a Wikipedia article in early 2024:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

This is much pithier. I approve.

Neuhaus's Law

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

However, one Charles Porterfield Krauth may be better credited with this law, as he wrote in 1872:

Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated, and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points.

This is, of course, in keeping with Stigler’s Law of Eponymy: “No eponymous law is named for its original discoverer.” This is worth bearing in mind while reading this article of eponymous laws!

Doctorow's Law

Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no."

Hodes' Law

Gentlemen avoid the excluded middle.

Martha’s Law of Vehicle Seating

The littlest takes the middlest; that's just the rules.

Heal's Law

The standard is not perfection. The standard is the alternative.

Thane's Law

Permanent majorities aren't; emerging majorities don't.

(Possibly derived from Osborn's Law.³)

Conquest's Three Laws of Politics

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

(Conquest’s Second Law is probably not Conquest’s. It is also accurately attributed as O’Sullivan’s First Law. Apocryphal or not, however, this ordering has become canonical.)

Cunningham's Law

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

Occam's Broom

In the heat of battle, even serious scientists sometimes cannot resist “overlooking” some data that seriously undermine their pet theory.

(attributed to Sydney Brenner; this formulation by Daniel Dennett)

Levine’s Law

Any time a regulator has to say explicitly that a rule is “very important,” that’s because he has some doubts.

Levine explains the law by adding, “You never see prosecutors announce a murder conviction by saying ‘this murderer violated the very important law against murder.’”

Smith’s Laws of Statutory Interpretation

1. Any bill titled by a strained acronym (e.g. “PATRIOT Act,” “DISCLOSE Act”) is presumptively unconstitutional.

2. Any bill named for a person other than a sponsor or co-sponsor (e.g. “Lily Ledbetter Act,” “Lakan Riley Act”) is presumptively unconstitutional.

3. The purpose of any bill is usually to do the opposite of what its title proclaims.

Named for Brad Smith, former FEC Commissioner.

Zeynep’s Law

Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.⁴

Zeynep’s Law is closely related to the…

Drunk Mormon Hypothesis

If a group sets a specific goal, the default hypothesis should be that they are not further from the goal than they would be if they did not have that goal. If a contrary claim (a “Drunk Mormon Hypothesis”) is made in the absence of proof, doubt it.⁵

Stein's Law

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

...which seems like a good one to end this post on.

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Changelog:

• 20 July 2020: Added some laws.

• 22 August 2020: Added some laws.

• 15 September 2020: Added Occam's Broom.

• 9 March 2022: Added Hodes' Law. (h/t Rachel Lu)

• 26 September 2022: Added Thane's Law and Heal’s Law (h/t master-thief)

• 1 October 2022: Added Levine’s Law.

• 26 January 2024: Added Zeynep’s Law, since weirdly nobody else has done so?

• 9 February 2025: Added Smith’s Laws of Statutory Interpretation.

• 22 July 2025: Added the Drunk Mormon Hypothesis.

• 17 May 2026: Some reformatting and new notes for the rerun. Stealthily added Stigler’s Law of Eponymy.

1. "Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task." -wiki

2. Mr. Dreher himself would no doubt remind us here that, because the Left still controls the majority of power centers in American society (most bureaucracies, all public schools, most news by consumption-minutes, nearly all non-profits, etc.), the Law of Merited Impossibility is more typically exemplified by the Left against the Right rather than the reverse.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was so alarming to the Left largely because it was so anomalous for the Right to control a social media platform. Previous attempts by the Right to establish a social media voice (like Parler) had been censored out of existence, leaving the Left in firm control of most online conversation.

Likewise Donald Trump’s repurposing of the federal civil rights bureaucracy on behalf of Asians and Whites against DEI initiatives (another place where I saw some of the Law of Merited Impossibility showing up). This was shocking because the federal civil rights bureaucracy has historically been a one-way ratchet for the Left.

As far as I know, then, Mr. Dreher has only ever invoked the Law of Merited Impossibility when discussing Left-wing attempts to beat up the Right, never the reverse. Nevertheless, when a reversal happens, I say it’s fair to invoke the Law.

3. In case that link ever goes down, Osborn’s Law is: Variables won’t. Constants aren’t.

4. For example, if you think widespread use of masks will slow the spread of a germ (first-order effect), but that confidence in masking will lead people to be careless about exposing themselves (second-order effect), thereby hastening the germ’s spread, you should assume masks will do much more to slow the spread than hasten it—until proved otherwise by very solid data.

5. For example, because Mormons aim to minimize drinking, it is unlikely that the median Mormon consumes more alcohol than the median non-Mormon. Because Democrats aim to minimize carbon emissions, the default hypothesis should be that Democrats are more likely to reduce carbon emissions than the Republicans. Because Prohibition aimed to reduce alcohol consumption, it likely succeeded in doing so. (It did.) Because abortion regulations and bans aim to reduce abortions, they likely succeed in doing so, and harsher abortion bans likely reduce them more. (They do.) And so forth.