Hacker News Reader

Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

And now we come to the unfortunate fact that there is no equivalent in English for the distinction between Recht and Gesetz, or droit and loi, both being subsumed under the term law. The former is an immanent thing, a "shared search after justice". The latter is temporal, it is written down and itemised in Strafgesetzbuche and Codes Civiles, and is very appealing to HNers because we can read "common standard for some subset of behavior" and think "I can put this into a computer". But that Law is not The Law. And The Law is not even Society. It's something we yearn for or desire, and our confidence in society varies with our confidence that our neighbours are also yearning for it with us. The rule of law is a feeling, man.

View on HN

English common law is largely not codified but the result of practices and precedent, and is still part of the legal system in most English-speaking countries, as opposed to continental-style civil codes that you mention which are more explicit. I do think that distinction exists in the English-speaking world.

Isn't this explained in the phrase "the spirit of the law" vs. "the letter of the law", or is there more to the concept.

I think "spirit of the law" can be interpreted as how the (written) law was trying to get at The Law. But even that spirit is not The Law. Here's an example - modern Germany defines itself as a Rechtsstaat. On the face of it this is a "State of the rule of law". But this fails to capture what distinguishes it from a hypothetical Gesetzstaat, so Wikipedia also tries on "state of justice and integrity" and "constitutional state" to get the distinction across. And the absence of Recht - a Nichtrechtsstaat - is one "based on the arbitrary use of power".

The historical context is that of trying to define what in a state should set it apart from both the 3rd Reich and the DDR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat

I suspect many Germans have varying personal interpretations (not being German). However, StackOverflow has a question/answer [1] where the most general answer is "right or freedom as in Recht auf freie Meinungsäußerung being 'freedom of speech'".

Otherwise, tends to represent "the encompassing scope of all laws" vs "the interactions of a single law."

The "the spirit of the law" tends to be more like: "what did we believe the law was supposed to do vs what does it actually result in if you're a rules lawyer."

Games have a lot of that with little oversight, legal laws tend to get publicly challenged. We made a rule where all the miniatures have to stand in squares, except now all anybody does is abuse the facing and distance rules.

[1] https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/30384/what-s-the-...

Perhaps what you are trying to express as "shared search after justice" could be thought of as a "Social Contract"; a non-codified agreement of how society (should) co-exists, in context of said Society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com