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> Any kind of law that mentions a company by name should be automatically rejected, unless

No "unless". No law should target a specific company or individual by name, ever, whether to give them special exceptions or special permissions or special restrictions or anything else.

(They also shouldn't target specific companies by sufficiently-specific-description-it-only-applies-to-one-or-two-companies, either.)




US Congress has been passing acts concerning specific people or institutions, directly referenced by their name since its inception. It's called private laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Congress#Public_law,_pr...


If course they can: laws frequently cite specific cases and specific abuses in their supporting documentation in order to point out the exact intent of the law.


Laws are not research papers, they don't need to cite sources.


The fact that they do not need to is true, but the typical law rests on a body of data and some of that data will be supplied with the bill depending on what the material is about.

This is because most laws are created with specific goals and purposes in mind, they're not born finished and ready to be voted on derived from first principles, they usually exist to address something quite specific.


I never said they "can't", I said they shouldn't.

Also, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with citing something as an example in the argumentation around a bill enacting a law (unless it's by way of targeting them with polemic), but there is something fundamentally wrong with putting that in the legal code itself.




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