The sources of law are as varied as the institutions in place for promulgating them. Some derive from charter documents such as constitutions and are foundational to the society; others from judges deciding cases and setting precedents that in turn affect future decisions; still others from the statutory enactments of legislators who (at least in theory) are directly accountable to voters and which enactments consist of laws aimed at dealing with broad categories of problems and issues concerning the whole society, such as tax systems, regulatory systems affecting commerce, and the like; still others derive from regulatory bodies set up under the various statutory schemes and charged with promulgating and sometimes enforcing detailed regulations under the authorizing statutes, as for example detailed tax regulations covering fine points of what does or does not qualify for a particular deduction or helping to interpret the meaning of otherwise broad language in a statute; still others come from local sources having nothing to do with a national government, such as state governments, local municipalities and the like; still others from international sources such as treaties adopted by a national government; and still others from direct popular sources such as systems authorized by state constitutions by which citizens can place initiatives on a ballot for a popular vote (this breakdown refers to U.S. law but applies generally to any form of Western-based system of modern constitutional government, such as that in the U.K.).

Virtually all these sources of law are what might be called "top down" - that is, once the mechanisms have been set up in a society that enable citizens to have some form of say in how a government is constituted and how its laws are enacted, the institutions take over and generate the laws going forward, whether through legislators, judges, or regulators, and average people basically get stuck with the results, having only limited recourse to do anything about any of this directly except for the occasional vote at the ballot box, participation in political campaigns, and the exercise of speech rights aimed at influencing the political process.

Given this top-down nature of law (in general), a site such as this will inherently have only limited value at best. The idea is to have politicians be more connected with the citizenry and less "out of touch" by being able to hear what ails average people and what they want changed. That is fine in itself but, presumably, the ability of an average citizen to sound off generally is already pretty substantial and especially in our modern age where blogs and the like have substantially enhanced that ability. With social media, many of the ideas coming from the citizenry can also take on a viral impetus, magnifying their impact. And, thus, it should be no secret to politicians what the big issues of the day generally are insofar as average people are reacting to them. This sort of site, one would guess, would do little to add anything meaningful to the knowledge base that politicians already possess of what within the law agitates people and calls for some form of change.

This sort of site might serve as a filtering mechanism by which the popular pulse might be better measured than from a random sampling of popular opinion but how is this any better than, say, a poll commissioned to sound out opinion on any given issue (even assuming that the input can be meaningfully organized so that it is not just random input from who knows what source)? If the site gets countless complaints about a particularly oppressive law from civil libertarians that business interests might support, or about overweening regulations that businesses hate but civil libertarians support, what does that add to the mix that is in any way meaningful? And how would this serve to influence politicians who already have their own philosophy about such issues, one way or the other? Do they listen to their boosters or to their detractors? If to the detractors, how will this have an impact if the site is not designed to afford any opportunity to make meaningful arguments that might persuade? Even if it could serve to sway politicians in some way, how would this affect the 90%+ of the laws that they don’t directly control (e.g., judge-made laws, constitutional laws, bureaucratic regulations)?

I have no problem with participatory democracy and do believe that making government more accessible to its citizens is a good thing. No one wants "top-down" rule in any absolutist sense of tyranny and, in a free society, the more accountable the politicians are to those who elect them the better.

But, given the realities of modern political institutions, the practical effect of such a site would seem to be negligible except that it gives the politicians promoting it an appearance of wanting to reach out and be responsive to average people. This in itself might have value but far more for the politicians involved than for the citizens affected by their actions.

I hope this doesn't sound cynical but, viewed with a professional eye (i.e., as one who deals with law in many forms), the impact of this site as structured on the law itself is very likely to be nil. Maybe with a different approach the idea could be better implemented. As is, though, I would call it more a stunt than anything else. Of course, I am not directly familiar with the political realities of the U.K. and may be off on this - from a distance, that is how I would assess it.