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A rough definition of a "knee jerk law" would be:
An example of a "knee jerk law" would be the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, which gave extremely broad powers to the executive in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Is there a technical term in political science for such laws?
The term moral panic is similar to what you're talking about, although moral panics tend to be be sustained, rather than just a momentary response. There's also the phrase "Never let a crisis go to waste", which is the idea that crises can be exploited to push an agenda. There's also "Hard cases make bad law", which is somewhat related.
Jasen almost had it, except the term sometimes used is reactive lawmaking. Some examples of usage
Reactive law-making does not typically make for good law, and parliament should resist the calls to use the terrorist attacks in Paris to make further changes to anti-terrorism laws.
A longer UK academic paper even speaks of "reactive treaty making" in a international context, as the counterpart to the domestic equivalent.
Two Israeli academics writing on a German blog (in English though) argue that most international law is "reactive".
It's not an incredibly common/established term though. Also "reactive" carries a less negative connotation than "knee jerk", in my impression.
An American (I think) book author suggests that emergency lawmaking might be the preferred synonym in the US context, and one can certainly find similar usage in other US writings. (Probably the same caveat applies to this not being an incredibly widespread term either.)
That book also uses crisis-driven legislation as a synonym, but most other usage of that term [I can find] appears to refer to the 2008-09 (financial) crisis and the legislation (or regulations) it entailed. But I suppose one can use it more broadly. There is one paper that uses it in a slightly different sense:
For over seven decades the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 has served as the model of crisis-driven legislation, but this process could just as aptly be called tragedy-driven.
Speaking broadly this is demagoguery, though I'm not sure there's a word for an individual act of demagoguery. The US Founding Founders tried to limit the impact of such inflammations of public mood, but (obviously) didn't account for the (future) influences of mass media and social media.
If you want a term that's not a metaphor.
A reactionary law.
I am not sure that there is one in English.
I live in Austria, and the term we use for this is "Anlassgesetzgebung". "Anlass" means occasion or cause. "Gesetzgebung" means legislation.
The German-language Wikipedia claims that in Germany, they use the terms "Ad-hoc-Gesetzgebung" or "Gelegenheitsgesetzgebung" (Gelegenheit = opportunity).
I don't know if there is an equivalent term in English or any other language.
It's perhaps not what you have in mind but many countries have enacted law in the face of a threat to the state's authority from serious criminals or subversives and called them names like Emergency Powers Act.
These acts would have in them a review date or a security assessment conditionality to assure citizens that they were not empowering a security state.
But maybe what you have in mind is something more like acts enacted after a civil disaster, e.g. a construction failure or a workplace disaster. In these cases the final act is seldom knee-jerk as there is usually a long public investigation and opportunity for dangerous builders and factory owners to smuggle their safety standard back onshore.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 provoked public outrage but there was no knee-jerk (i.e. immediate) reaction in terms of new legislation. That all had to wait for Wagner and Smith to milk the public outrage to push their own political careers - without putting some of their business supporter in trouble with factory inspectors.
Not surprisingly legislators tend to put themselves first in matters of immediate legislation. The David's Law was pushed after a UK MP was murdered by an Islamist extremist who used social media to spread his hate agenda.
The technical term will perhaps have more to do with the congressional/parliamentary procedure under which a new act may be given immediate priority over all other acts tracked into the legislative pipeline rather than the nature of the demand for such an act.
In Ireland it's called emergency legislation but I don't know enough about these procedures internationally to help you further.
According to the Lao Tzu all laws are to some extent "knee-jerk" laws:
The more laws and restrictions there are, The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons, The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are, The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers.Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.
What you call knee-jerk laws I call after-the-fact laws: Something bad happens. Public is upset. Laws are instituted. But the context which generated the law is already past tense!
Sliding slightly south from Lao Tzu in India there is no single word for 'law' but two with very different connotations -- dharma and karma. Both get translated into English as 'law': So Manu's dharma-shastra is Manu's law book. And 'karma' is law of cause and effect. It seems a bit strange (at least to us easterners) to conflate these two -- natural law and moral law.
Putting Lao Tzu above into Indian format we get : "Pay more attention to karma -- how everyone acts out in the only way they know how to act out -- and the need to strive to be dharmic (moral, ethical, religious etc) correspondingly diminishes."
On the other side the slide downhill desribed by Lao Tzu has these analogues in the IT world
One can make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. Or make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors
[Characterization of a fail safe system]
When a fail-safe system fails it fails because it fails to fail safe
So don't know if there is standard term, inspired by the picture of doing a diagnosis from a post-mortem the term I'd use is: Post-mortem law
There is apparently an aphorism related to this, hard cases make bad law. Of course, it being an aphorism, different interpretations are possible, but the cited SCOTUS pronouncement seems relevant:
The expression dates at least to 1837. It was used in 1904 by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Its validity has since been questioned and dissenting variations include the phrase "Bad law makes hard cases", and even its opposite, "Hard cases make good law".
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a utilitarian[clarification needed] argument for this in his judgment of Northern Securities Co. v. United States (1904):[4]
Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance... but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.
In aviation, it is possible to find the phrasing that "most of the aviation safety rules are written in blood". This is because a new rule is usually added after the accident happens, in order to prevent the further accidents like that. This is not seen a very wrong approach.
A neutral term for this in politics is Communitarianism (not to be confused with Communism or Communalism). Communitarianism is a general belief that a person's personality is molded by the community more so than the individual themselves and that because of this, laws should be written so the community promotes good ideas and morality.
Communitarianism is sort of a center political issue as it can be exhibited in both sides of a political debate. For example, in the United States, when discussion of how to stop mass shootings, one side might take issues with the availability of guns in American Society and how we need more laws that restrict access to guns, while the other side will often cite points about how many mass shootings are the results of poor mental health services in the United States OR how American society has been eroding the importance of Fatherhood (many recent mass shooters had no father figure in their lives).
Which ever side you come down on, both argue from a point of view that the problem is societal and not individual... that there is someone, other than the guy who shot a bunch of people, who is to blame for the tragedy and that if the laws could cure what causes this, we'd see a drop.
Other issues where this was seen to not work was the Prohibition Era. The thinking was that Americans drink a lot, drinking has negative effects on society, and we should ban alcohol from being consumed. It didn't work and actually had the opposite effect of people drinking more and due to the lack of regulatory controls on the supply of any illegal good, more dangerously. It didn't stop crime, but made it a golden age for organized crime in the United States. But the solution was Communitarianism laws in action - if society can be more moral than individuals can be more moral.
And the laws need not be bans... Smoking is bad for you. Drinking is bad for you. Too much sugar is bad for you. Let's tax these products higher so you lose more money when you participate. The mockery of the idea is why many people refer to prostitution as "The World's Oldest Profession" despite almost every society in history having a negative view of people who sell themselves for sex, people still do it even when it's illegal.
