I prefer judges and lawyers interpret what the law says, not what they believe lawmakers meant to say. It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws. Such hacks expose weaknesses in the laws as written.
Edit: ...when successful.
Edit: ...when successful.
In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.
Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.
It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.
We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.
Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.
Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it.
In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.
Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”
I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.
Yet almost everyone fails.
You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?
I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.
Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law
Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)
Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.
Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.
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.
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.
This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".
Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.
Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.
Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.
Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.
And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-gorsuch-and-the-case-of-...
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/gorsuch-transam-t...
And thank you for providing some excellent example of why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust are important.
Judges are there to make the boundaries clear for the greyzone on what's not written down
The world is too complex to get perfect laws written. You're always going to miss weird edge cases in both directions