[bee_rider]

“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.

We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.

Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.

[klaustopher]

You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.