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Notes -
Yes - it is certainly possible to write banking and aviation laws that an intelligent layman can understand and put the technical detail into agency regulations. (The UK does this). There is an open question about when the technical detail should go into primary legislation (which means that at least the legislators on the relevant committee will need to understand it) - for instance the EU puts most of the technical content of its bank capital adequacy rules into primary regulation in a way the UK and US don't. The Anglosphere tradition is that the only time you have to put the detail into primary legislation is tax law, and even there the US has delegated significant tariff-setting powers to the President (with the Trump tariff litigation being about whether this delegation should be interpreted broadly or narrowly).
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