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by anoncake 2585 days ago
> But seriously, if you're at the point of having to rely on "the spirit of the law" it's pretty much always because the letter of the law is poorly drafted.

There is a truth to that. We need to rely on the spirit of the law because lawmakers, like everyone else, are neither omniscient nor do they never make mistakes. Letting people use unintended loopholes makes sense if you treat the law as a game, not if you treat it as a mechanism to achieve justice.
1 comments
AnthonyMouse 2585 days ago
It's not a question of infallibility. Legislators will make mistakes. They're human.

The question is, what do you do when you find one?

Option one is that you go back to the legislature and have them fix the law, which then applies to future conduct. Particularly for issues affecting ongoing operations on this scale, this is a completely reasonable option.

Option two is that you go to the court and ask them to remake the law and apply it retroactively to past conduct, then impose billions of dollars in fines for following the law as it was written.

But option one doesn't extract revenue from foreign companies. Which is why people are suspicious of your motives when you jump to option two.

Option one also has the advantage that it can produce more coherent results, because the legislature doesn't have to operate under the pretext that it isn't making a change to the law when it really is.

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anoncake 2585 days ago
> But option one doesn't extract revenue from foreign companies. Which is why people are suspicious of your motives when you jump to option two.

I don't think we need to cater to paranoid Americans.

> Option one also has the advantage that it can produce more coherent results, because the legislature doesn't have to operate under the pretext that it isn't making a change to the law when it really is.

It's perfectly reasonable for a legislature to assume it isn't changing the law when the law isn't being changed and it's not the legislature that is acting.

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AnthonyMouse 2584 days ago
> I don't think we need to cater to paranoid Americans.

A fine position if you don't care about businesses abandoning the European market and the US government using it to justify retaliation against EU companies in the US market.

> It's perfectly reasonable for a legislature to assume it isn't changing the law when the law isn't being changed and it's not the legislature that is acting.

If a court is interpreting the law to mean something other than what it says, it's changing the law.

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anoncake 2584 days ago
> A fine position if you don't care about businesses abandoning the European market and the US government using it to justify retaliation against EU companies in the US market.

Oh well. We might become as isolated as China. Businesses don't care about rule of law when there is profit to be made. Also most people are capable of understanding how laws and courts work.

> If a court is interpreting the law to mean something other than what it says, it's changing the law.

If a court is making jokes and filming sketches, it's a comedy troupe.

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