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Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.
A concept dating back to Roman law has it that ignorance of fact may excuse, but not ignorance of law.
Could Bulgaria be granted an exception from the rule? And why has ignorance of lawmakers been left out?
A newly published study of Legal Barometer, a civil initiative for monitoring, analysis and assessment of the condition and development of the legal system in Bulgaria, has shown that the corpus of national legislation is swelling at an alarming pace and is already brimful of pointless, cryptic and transient normative acts.
According to the report spanning the first six month of 2011, Bulgaria's Parliament passed a total of 89 laws for the period, or an average of 14-15 per month.
9 out of 89 were new laws, 55 were laws amending and supplementing existing laws and 25 were ratifications.
22 of the 89 were amended more than once in the period.
The Interior Ministry Act was repaired four times during the said timeframe.
The Labor Code scored 7 amendments in 12 months, with 3 of them taking place in the studied period.
Close to half of the 89 pieces of legislation had undergone revisions in the previous half year.
The study revealed that the administration churned out over 400 new and revised pieces of subordinate legislation in the period January-July 2011, chalking up 2+ amendments of a document per day.
It also identified another alarming trend, namely, the willingness of lawmakers to regulate key issues through secondary legislation, thereby producing dangerously adjustable, severely underdiscussed and exceptionally piecemeal combination of legislative solutions.
To sum up, rapidly changing and haphazard norms create instability and unpredictability in key spheres such as trade, taxes and accounting, healthcare, social security, education, internal order, defense, etc.
This trend acts as a strong deterrent to investment.
It also points to the failure of the state to enforce the rule of law and maintain public order.
Last but not least, it places a question mark over lawmakers' competence and "good faith".
So much about the legis, what about the ignoratia?
Using the above data, Daniel Vulchev, Senior Assistant Professor in General Theory of Law at the Faculty of Law of the St. Kliment Ochridski Sofia University, former Education Minister and Project Manager at the Legal Barometer initiative, calculated that an average law student faced an estimated 5000 "different" normative acts during the 5-year course of study, 1000 of them being brand new legislation.
This leaves hoards of law students, if not outright ignorant, then extremely confused at the unstoppable flow of relevant incoming information.
Experts in the field, despite their solid experience, are as much frustrated.
The "man on the street", the weakest link in the chain, remains willfully blind.
If each ordinance is to be amended twice in the course of the day, how do you know if what you did in the morning will stay legal by sunset?
You don't.
Which has to count as a good excuse.
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