[AlecSchueler]

It does and of course it's different happened. My pet peeve has to be the "it's a poorly worded law" argument about things that have obviously been considered by legal experts. The scares like "the psychoactive substances act will technically make coffee illegal" I've seen on HN are particularly egregious.

[iamnothere]

Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.

Legislators should force future would-be tyrants to flagrantly violate the law, as this is more likely to generate popular resistance.

[AlecSchueler]

> Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.

The point is that these laws aren't badly written. There's already protections in place for what's described above.

[iamnothere]

I don’t believe this is the case, every now and then we see prosecutors using an obsolete unenforced law or an unexpected edge case of some law to come after people.

A great example is the CFAA. It has been judicially narrowed after court battles, because in its original form it was overbroad and criminalized basic, common things. Prosecutors abused it in order to get political wins until they were finally stopped.

This is unfortunately fairly common. Legislators either push for too much or don’t understand how the law might be applied, and innocent people suffer until someone wins a big expensive set of appeals.

Edit: I realize now you may be talking about the UK in particular, in which case you don’t even get this shoddy level of protection as “Parliament is sovereign” (lol).

[AlecSchueler]

I'm talking about the specific law that was being discussed, and the particular other law I used as an example. And the protection mentioned was the one of double jeopardy which had also been explicitly mentioned.

[iamnothere]

Double jeopardy was partially eliminated in the UK in 2003 for qualifying offenses. I don’t think this has been tested, but during a retrial, a refusal to provide a password would be a separate RIPA offense from any refusal during the first trial. So you could actually be jailed more than once for this. For qualifying offenses all that is required for a retrial is “new and compelling evidence” which is a low hurdle for politically unpopular defendants.

[AlecSchueler]

If that did happen you'd have a good case from the Human Rights Act because it becomes indefinite imprisonment. The UK is still following the ECHR as well.

But arguing these theoretical untested-because-they-never-happen edge cases isn't exactly pushing forward a good case for this law having been "badly written." There's seemingly no problem with it in practice.

[JasperBit]

Dismissing the concerns about poorly worded laws on the basis that they have been considered by legal experts is laughable when it's often legal experts, and in the case of the Psychoactive Substances Act, the government's own advisors that are the ones raising concerns with the broad applicability and unenforceable nature of these controversial laws. The Psychoactive Substances Act has an explicit exemption stating food is not covered by the law for crying out loud, and the exemption for healthcare providers to act within the course of their profession was only added as an amendment, it wasn't even considered in the original drafting of the bill.

[AlecSchueler]

> The Psychoactive Substances Act has an explicit exemption stating food is not covered by the law for crying out loud,

Why the "for crying out loud?" That's an example of the law being well written in a way that covers the knee jerk reactions to "it's too broad, it's badly written!"

> the government's own advisors that are the ones raising concerns with the broad applicability

What's your issue with this? They're advisors, it's their job to raise concerns that lead to the inclusion of exemptions like the one you're "crying out loud" about.

> it wasn't even considered in the original drafting of the bill.

That's why bills go through various stages of drafting and debate, and why parliament seeks out and considers the advice from industry. It's "laughable" to judge the quality of a law by the original draft, just as it would be too judge a piece of software by the initial commit.