[dataflow]

Companies with literally thousands of people with billions of dollars to invest have a hard time making their products bug-free no matter how many times they patch and rewrite, and we're talking about dealing with computers here. Exactly how many years of rewrites are you willing to spend on each piece of legislation to make it bug-free? Is it even remotely realistic? or will your solution grind legislation to a halt?

[cgriswald]

My statement that judges should interpret law and not lawmakers is not equivalent to this idea that law must be flawless and bug-free. Those are ideas you've brought to the table that I've already disclaimed. I said laws should be quality laws. What qualifies as quality in law isn't "100% bug-free, literal, unambiguous, single-definition words that don't require any interpretation at all." To the extent that a law is bad (as qualified by law, not by a computer code metaphor), no I don't think judges should go about the business of guessing how it should work. It ought to be punted back to lawmakers. (Otherwise why even separated the two: Just have lawmakers act as judges or vice versa.)

[dataflow]

I realize you're disclaiming them, but I'm trying to say you what you're asking for has consequences that you can't just "disclaim" like that. Practically every law will have unintended loopholes that legislators couldn't think of or practically enumerate when writing the law. If you keep "punting it back to lawmakers" instead of letting judges handle the exceptions, you obviously further obstruct the legislature's ability to move onto new, more pressing issues. Maybe that's fine with you—or maybe it's even your goal, I can't possibly know—but your optimization on that axis has severe consequences that will quite obviously lead to undesirable outcomes on many other axes that others (if not you) actually care about. You can disclaim the implications and the consequences, but that doesn't mean they won't come along with your idea.

[robertlagrant]

Maybe spending more time on getting current laws right would be better than moving on to new laws.

More laws = more ways people/organisations are burdened with things they need to know (and will be punished for whether or not they know). Having canonical interpretations of laws that aren't written in the laws just makes that even more fraught with peril.

[cgriswald]

Those consequences do not follow, because I am not asking for judges to interpret the law literally. If that's what you've read, we have a miscommunication here. There's an entire spectrum of interpretation from literal to "I personally know the guy who authored this law and I asked him what he meant."

The poster I originally responded to thinks we ought to be further right along this spectrum. I think we're either in a good place or if anything we ought to move a little further left. I don't think either extreme is desirable, and the left extreme is where we get those consequences you want to ascribe to me.

The justice system is already quite intolerant of such hacks. In the Ford case, they didn't even interpret the law differently. Instead, they determined—with evidence— that Ford was actually importing cargo vans and not passenger vans.

[eru]

Perhaps having fewer laws on the books would be a good idea? Especially if the laws were simpler?