The letter of the law can open up cans of worms.
You've never heard of the exploitation of legal loopholes?
Do you suspect that the statutes of Canadian law which applies to this particular case are ambiguous? Or if not, should they be, and would that somehow help in some way?
The letter of the law is critical because the word choice matteres. The difference between consent and informed consent is huge.
However, the inclusion of intent into a law doesn't inherently require any ambiguity in the law itself. The way in which intent factors into a statue can be crystal clear.
> The difference between consent and informed consent is huge.
And not fuzzy in any way; quite "binary", like a computer.
Only in theory, in practice these things decided on a case by case basis. You get things like, "Is the wording of this document clear enough not just possible to decipher."
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.[4]" is actually part of case law.