constitutional-law civil-legal-system bills
Which standards prevent laws from naming specific targets?
<p>It seems normative that a law cannot enumerate any specific persons or companies to be included or excluded from its provisions. Imagine: "Violation of this section is punishable by a $100 fine; Joel S. to pay triple."</p>

<p>Such rules could surely cause conflicts of interest, and I know from programming that very specific heuristics tend to be brittle in practice. Are there specific legal principles which put this practice off limits?</p>

<p>It may &quot;seem[] normative&quot; that &quot;a law cannot enumerate any specific persons or companies to be included or excluded from its provisions.&quot; But in fact it is not generally the case. There are various kinds of laws that traditionally have  named specific people or entities to define their scope. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>In nineteenth-century England, a divorce could only be granted by a specific law passed by Parliament, naming the persons to be divorced. I am not sure when the practice stopped.</p>
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<li><p>In the US during the nineteenth century (and I think the early twentieth century also) a corporation was normally formed by a specific law granting a charter of incorporation to the named company.</p>
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<li><p>In the US during the period 1866-1870 there were a number of laws passed permitting former Confederate officers and officials who were presented by the 14th amendment from holding office under the US or any state to hold office again, as the amendment provides for. Eventually Congress passed a more general amnesty.</p>
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<li><p>It was once common for the English Parliament to pass <em><strong>bills of attainder</strong></em>. These were legislative declarations that a particular person was guilty of a particular crime, generally without any trial or other process. Sometimes the specific sentence was also imposed by such a bill. This was sufficiently resented that the US Constitution specifically forbids Congress or any state from passing such a bill.</p>
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<li><p>It was once common for actual laws to grant payments to specific people for specific purposes. This is no longer common, but there is no legal bar to it in either the UK or the US that I know of.</p>
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<li><p>The UK <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988#Peter_Pan" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988</a> contains a provision enabling Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children to continue to receive royalties for performances and adaptations, publications and broadcast of &quot;Peter Pan&quot; whose author, J. M. Barrie, had given his copyright to the hospital in 1929, later confirmed in his will. This right is to persist even after the expiration of ordinary copyright for the play, but is not a full grant of copyright.</p>
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<li><p>Laws or ordinances invoking eminent domain to take the property of particular individuals for particular purposes are common, mostly at the local level.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>In the US, the Equal Protection Clause generally forbids laws which treat people, or groups of people, differently unless there is some <em><strong>rational basis</strong></em> for the distinction. But in some cases a plausible basis is asserted and such laws are passed.</p>
