You’ve heard it from your buddies and maybe from your cranky uncle: “You have to be a lawyer to understand these deer hunting regs!” A few of the grumblers prone to conspiracy theories insist that state agencies make regulations needlessly complicated to ensnare otherwise law-abiding hunters. Why else would annual proclamations (as the published hunting regulations are called in many states) run nearly 200 pages of tiny print and obscure terminology?
A new study of all 50 states’ hunting regulations suggests that, while published rules aren’t intentionally problematic, they can be hard to