In practice, the process for this is completely broken, so we have a system where the judicial branch pretends to divinate intent from the tea-leaves of legislation, even when it's clear that there could not possibly have been any informed intent because major relevant details were simply not known at the time.
It's not great, but it's better than a system where the judicial branch just does anything it wants.
All this said, instant communication and computers almost certainly introduced better forms of judicial and legislative process that haven't been experimented with because of inertia. I wouldn't volunteer our system as the guinea pig, but I hope that somebody gets around to experimenting with this, because our system sucks hard in a bunch of ways that seem like they are probably fixable.
In practice, the process for this is completely broken, so we have a system where the judicial branch pretends to divinate intent from the tea-leaves of legislation, even when it's clear that there could not possibly have been any informed intent because major relevant details were simply not known at the time.
It's not great, but it's better than a system where the judicial branch just does anything it wants.
All this said, instant communication and computers almost certainly introduced better forms of judicial and legislative process that haven't been experimented with because of inertia. I wouldn't volunteer our system as the guinea pig, but I hope that somebody gets around to experimenting with this, because our system sucks hard in a bunch of ways that seem like they are probably fixable.