“Laws excessive in number and poor in quality not only discredit the law; they also undermine what our ancestors constructed, a relatively stable and spontaneous law of the land, common to all, and based on rules of general application…. legislative bodies are generally indifferent to, or even ignorant of, the basic forms and consistencies of the legal pattern. They impose their will through muddled rules that cannot be applied in general terms; they seek sectional advantage in special rules that destroy the nature of law itself. And it is not only a matter of the generality of the law. Mass fabrication of laws ends by jeopardising the other fundamental requisite of law – certainty. Certainty does not consist only in a precise wording of laws or in their being written down: It is also the long-range certainty that the laws will be lasting. Nor is this all. In practice, the legislative conception of law accustoms those to whom the norms are addressed to accept any and all commands of the State.”
Giovanni Sartori The Theory of Democracy Revisited (quoted by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century)