[spikels]

It's pretty sad but you what you say is correct: We can no longer just read our laws in order to understand what they say. Instead we need to pay lawyers to tell us what they mean even when they appear to be very clear like the first amendment.

And of course like your scholar they are free to make up there own interpretation at any time. If they can get enough of their colleagues to go along then that interpretation becomes the meaning. Maybe start with something reasonable like shouting fire in a theatre.

But after two hundred years that meaning can drift pretty far. What was originally purely a constraint on the power of government can be transformed into a constraint on the rights of private citizens - the very people the bill of rights was meant to protect!

Is there any wonder why the forth amendment has done so little to stop mass surveillance? Or individual health insurance mandates are constitutional because they could have been implemented as a tax? Or the commerce clause covers absolutely anything? Or words like "is" and "no" can simply be redefined as needed.

Perhaps I am naive but I would like laws that most people can understand by reading them. Too bad the people interpreting and writing our laws have every incentive to continue to do exactly the opposite.

Sorry for the rant!

[gottagetmac]

You're never going to have a useful legal system where the laws are simple enough for everyone to understand. Free speech is a complex idea.

To put it in HN terms, suppose I were to say "It's pretty sad that we can no longer look at assembly code to understand what our computer programs will do. Instead we need to pay software engineers to tell us how they work even when it's doing something simple, like running a search engine."