Legal Question in Appeals and Writs in California

Re: there oughta be a law for this

In California, anybody can submit a ballot initiative and have it submitted to the voters -- at least in theory.

To have a realistic chance of succeeding, you would need millions of dollars for hiring paid signature gatherers and for producing and airing TV commercials. As an alternative, your money might be (or might not be) better spent in lobbying the State Legislature to pass your proposed law(s). If you have access to these kinds of resources, please call or email me.

A good place to start is www.ss.ca.gov (the California Secretary of State website) where you can view information about the initiatives that are on the ballot, or that are in the process of qualifying for the ballot.

Re: there otughta be a law . . .

To elaborate on Mr. Stone's response:

In order to get an initiative on the ballot you would need to collect many thousands of signatures supporting such a step. Publicizing the initiative, printing the petition forms, hiring staff, etc. all cost money, hence the large sums Mr. Stone described.

If anyone could come up with a proposed law and get it on the ballot automatically, there would be thousands of proposals to consider every time there is an election. Because few of these proposed laws would have been drafted by people who know what they're doing, most would be ambiguous, would fail to correct the problem which inspired them and/or would conflict in unintended ways with existing laws. Others would be blatantly unconstitutional, and many would be so off-the-wall that they would stand no chance of winning voter approval.

The state's Legislative Analyst reviews all initiatives that make it to the ballot, and his non-partison evaluation of their costs and practical impact appears in the information booklet voters receive before election day. Preparing such evaluations for thousands of proposals each time around would be incredibly expensive, and the information booklets (as well as the ballots themselves) would become far too large to be practical.

Your best starting point would probably be your state representative or senator. If they agree with you, they might sponsor the bill in the legislature and get it enacted into law without the need for a state-wide vote. If your legislators don't like your idea, you could contact others in search of a sponsor. If that fails, you will probably need to either invest a lot of your own money or find some wealthy backers so you can try to get the needed signatures.