New Delhi, Nov. 10 -- A mature legal system must know when to legislate and when to let go. Statutes, like institutions, are not immortal. They must be periodically examined for relevance and coherence. As Jeremy Bentham observed, law must reflect reason, not persistence. Yet in India, persistence often masquerades as legality. Statutes enacted for contexts that have long disappeared remain formally alive, cluttering the statute book, creating interpretive confusion, and occasionally being invoked to extract rent or stall reform.

Every legal system faces the problem of legislative sedimentation. State governments, in particular, often lack an authoritative inventory of their own statutes. Some are mere legal fossils, colonial regulations...