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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The headline is funny, but the opinion is boring and obvious. The act itself defines the term "fish":

    ‘[f]ish’ means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate,
    amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”

It's just a technicality. A statute was written using the term "fish" in a bunch of places, and rather than replace "fish" with "fish, mollusk, invertebrate, &c" in every place where that term was used, they just changed the definition. Every statute you'll ever read has explicit definitions, presumably for this exact reason.

Fun fact: for a time, according to Dave Arnold, the Catholic church defined beavers as meat, but beaver tails as fish. You could eat the tail on a Friday, but not the rest of the beaver.

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So instead of refactoring, they hacked around it, and now the law is that much harder to read.

Law making and programming are quite similar in some ways, and share some pathologies.

I don't understand. I think the term "fish" was defined in the text, so fish is akin to a variable name with its true identity defined in a single place. So they wanted to add something to the term "fish" so they changed that one place.

Seems more sensible and less error prone than using "fish, mollusks..." everywhere and doing a ctrl+f and adding a ", bees" everywhere. Doing the ctrl+f approach would be the hack IMO. I guess they could have changed the variable name as well but legal documents probably aren't written in IntelliJ or some other tool where you can confidently believe that you changed every occurrence. Plus, you don't have compiler warnings!

Unless I'm misunderstanding something or your comment...

I suppose the "clean code" solution implied here is to change the term "fish" to something like "species of concern".

Yes - redefining "fish" is similar to "#DEFINE ONE = 0.99"

It's a landmine for future developers who want to parachute in, understand what is happening, make a fix, and jetpack out again.

Law making is kinda logic programming[0]. Someone even wrote the constitution of Japan in prolog ! [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming

[1] https://github.com/bitlaw-jp/the-constitution-of-japan

"Code of Law"

Ship it!

Sadly this fact won't stop people from trying to paint California as some kooky place where everyone thinks bees are fish.

Not everyone - only the geniuses in the legislature think bees are fish.

Except they don't. "Fish" in this context is a term of art, clearly defined in the legislation. If the people who wrote this legislation actually believed bees were fish, then they would not have gone out of their way to provide such a clear and specific definition of the term for the purposes of this legal document.

To the lay person, legalese often sounds silly, but it is not without purpose or direction.

The mistake they made is that they used a much broader category in the clarifier for the definition of fish than they may have intended to. "Invertebrate" is a massive section of the animal kingdom. Poor choice of words if they only meant the wet ones.

> The mistake they made is that they used a much broader category in the clarifier for the definition of fish than they may have intended to. "Invertebrate" is a massive section of the animal kingdom. Poor choice of words if they only meant the wet ones.

The court examined historical evidence specifically to evaluate the argument that the law was intended to apply only to “wet ones” and rejected that argument.

Seems like a problem for the legislature to clear up, not the courts! The law itself is quite clear as it stands.

Only if the intent of the law is ambiguous enough that the courts find themselves unable to parse it. This language is certainly a bit odd, but it was plenty easy for the courts to suss out what was meant here.

If the legislature disagrees with the court's conclusion, then they are free to amend the legislation in question.

Among the reasons we have courts is to clear up ambiguous law; this question of the definition of the word falls squarely on the shoulders of the judiciary, and there is no procedure for referring a question like this to the legislature (and at the rate legislators operate, imagine if we had such a procedure... People's court cases would be jammed in limbo for even longer waiting for the legislature to stop pocket vetoing their question).

Adding a system for that would not be impossible but would have to be done carefully. Instead, we have the system as it currently operates... The law says what it says, the courts declare interpretations if people disagree, and the legislature may, but is not obligated to, act to pass law with further clarification if they have concern with the court's interpretation.

This law is not remotely ambiguous. You don't have to read tea leaves to figure out what a fish is. A bumble bee is a fish; it says so right in the text of the law, unmistakeably.

The legislation is clear. If the legislation is incorrect, it should be amended. The court did its job.

We agree.

I'm not convinced it was an accident. They took an existing statute, decided they wanted to extend it, and did it in the lazy way of adding "invertebrates" to "fish" instead of replacing the word "fish" all over the place.

The "bug" is (or rather, isn't) in this phrase: "[n]o person shall import into this state, or take, possess, or sell within this state, any bird, mammal, fish, amphibia or reptile, or any part or product thereof, that the commission determines to be an endangered animal or rare animal, except as otherwise provided in this chapter." I guess there must be a very good reason why they didn't want to add "invertebrate" (or, to be safe, "other animal") to this list and instead chose to repeatedly expand the definition of "fish". Ok, "fish" included crustaceans, and those are related to insects, so if you squint hard enough...

You don't have to wonder about this. The court tracked down the context behind the definition, and it was written specifically to include terrestrial invertebrates (including the Lange metalmark butterfly and the Trinity bristle snail).

The only reason this seems complicated is because the headline of this post has asked us to find it complicated. The real story is quite boring.

Do you know in fact that the legislature changed the definition after the fact? It seems to me more like crappy law-making than expedient changes.

Yes, the ruling mentions it (with dates).

All details of laws are "technicalities." They matter.

The Legislature is the body to address the gap, not the court.

As the Court sees it, there is no "gap." The legislature defined fish to include terrestrial invertebrates, including discussing one specifically (a snail).

The Court has to do something to resolve the issue. Either the legislature meant to include some but not all terrestrial invertebrates (e.g. snails but not bugs), or they included all (snails and bugs). The court went with the literal meaning of what the legislature wrote rather than drawing arbitrary lines without support.

What would you have them do instead?

> The Legislature is the body to address the gap, not the court.

They did. They said that “fish” includes, among other things, any inverterbrate.

The people challenging the executive action authorized by the legislature with this language wanted the court to declare that “any invertebrate” in the law does not include bees. But the courts are the wrong place for this: if they think the executive branch should not have regulatory authority over bees which the legislature has granted it over all invertebrates, they should take this to the legislature (or the people, acting via the power of initiative) to alter the grant of authority.

> They did. They said that “fish” includes, among other things, any inverterbrate.

This is incorrect. It includes "invertebrates", not "any invertebrates". The question is whether a bumblebee is as much of a "fish" as a mollusk.

That is not in fact the question. The headline of this story asks you to believe it's the question, but the real story is much more boring than that, which you'll easily see by reading the actual decision. No, in fact, the word "invertebrates" was chosen specifically to include several endangered terrestrial invertebrates.

> We certainly agree section 45 is ambiguous as to whether the Legislature intended for the definition of fish to apply to purely aquatic species.

There's 9 pages of analysis on the scope. Changing "invertebrate" to "any invertebrate" clearly begs the question.

No, it doesn't.

They did, when they explicitly defined "fish" to include bumble bees. You're the one asking the court to find meaning not present in the letter of the law.

The legislature did address the gap. The legal text, as passed by the legislature, defines fish (within the context of the document) to include invertebrates. They could have called "fish," anything in this case. They could have called fish, apples. Doesn't make a difference.

It couldn't be clearer. ignoring the text of the law and then declaring the court to have not done its job is ridiculous. In fact, if the court IGNORED the text of the law, I'd think that they'd be more open to a "legistlating from the bench," critique.

For example, many traffic laws refer to roadways as highways, even if e.g. it is a driveway or a backalley.

> The Legislature is the body to address the gap, not the court.

They did, by changing the definition of fish to include all invertebrates.

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