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"fair" is not equal to "what the law says". For example our laws allow a lot of unethical actions at stock markets. Things like buying all resources of one kind to later sell them for higher price, all in the name of profit.
Even when a law should actually protect us, the reality is, that they who have sufficient financial means, wealth, whatever, can go against the law and hope to get away with it for many years or even hide the fact they did it from us, because of lacking transparency on many layers of our system. Some are more equal than others before the law. Unfortunately still true in 2019. We have separation of power, at least, which in many cases protects us from the ones with a lot of economical power directly making the laws. Also some praise at this point to the people who make the law, because to me it seems that they are rarely bought. There is some integrity there. I would not call the big ball of mud that our law systems are very advanced. Actually it is rather primitive, some kind of patchwork rug, where we only try to fill the gaps.
To make a really advanced law system, that does not only react on oversights from the past ("Oh that's a grey zone. Let's make a new law for this case!"), we would have to get rid of a lot of the interpretable adjectives in the texts or define them all in a way, that is accessible for non-lawyers and not only based on past decisions in law processes (You can buy commented law texts, about 10 times as much text to read to understand a law and how it was used in past processes, which is what verdicts are often based on.). We would have to prune many special cases and abstract from them to more generalized rules. The law would have to be made in such a way, that most people could understand and need not go to a lawyer to "learn what is right" according to the law.
Especially in the Internet / IT sphere laws are being made, where one can only scratch ones head and ask oneself: "What were they thinking?! Did they have _any_ expert on board when writing this text?" It seems that law making has too few interaction with real domain experts and a disconnect with reality in the IT area. Law is a very traditional subject, while IT is a very modern thing that evolves faster than they can make new laws. While our ideas of law might be a great accomplishment and certainly indispensable for our current society and its structure, I would not call it "one of our greatest". I find philosophical ideas to be a much greater result. Admittedly, it is a hard problem to solve, to put philosophical ideas cleanly into law texts. That's why law making should never be rushed and well thought through, while getting input from as many real experts as possible during the whole process. |