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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

> As an example, the court explained that whether the Super Bowl happens is an “occurrence,” but who wins it is not.

This level of parsing looks like judicial legislation to me. Isn't it one occurrence if the Rams win and another if the Packers win? Better that they declare the law void for vagueness and give the legislature another shot at it. Guessing what the words mean, when it is not at all clear to professionals let alone to the average citizen does not give proper notification of what the law is to the people subject to it.

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Everyone agreed that this (what the court ruled) was the plain meaning of the law up until Kalshi just decided to go for it. They basically did an Uber on the law, completely ignoring how it had long been interpreted and demanding someone stop them. And only once Kalshi wanted to make money on sports gambling did there start to be parsing like this, to try to argue that sports gambling was legal on a CFTC-regulated exchange. If Kalshi had gotten the law thrown out for vagueness then basically there was a road map for making any law that got in the way of a company making money thrown out for vagueness.

The key is that up until a few years ago basically the universal consensus was that sports gambling was not possible on a CFTC regulated exchange, then all of a sudden Kalshi did it and now they are trying to pay enough lawyers to get them to justify it. This ruling is not judicial legislation, this is demanding that companies actually follow the law.

Declaring the law void for vagueness would not favor Kalshi. It would undercut the federal preemption that Kalshi is advocating for.

Since when has vagueness been considered a bad thing for statutes? It's the foundation of the US (and anglo) legal system and why courts exist, to fill in. And vague statutes that can be interpreted by courts has long been preferred to precise legislated meaning that you seem to prefer.

You could live in Germany or France if you prefer a legal system more ruled by clear statute?

If vagueness isn't a problem then we can simplify the law by replacing it all with one sentence: Let there be justice.

The idea is to provide overarching guidance, but when there is devil in the details, leave that up to courts to consider when there is a real actual issue at play, rather than legislators in the ivory tower theorizing about how things might play out.

The statute gives the general intent, but with an understanding that until the shit hits the fan in an actual court case, noone will have truly considered the detailed ramifications, so leave some intentional ambiguity there for the courts to resolve on real, actual, grounded cases rather than theorizing.

And if the legislature disagrees with a courts opinion about the ambiguity it left, it is very free to clarify in statute, which will override the court! (Unless the issue is constitutional, in which case the legislature is very free to draft a constitutional amendment!)

I love it when programmers try to play lawyer. Law is not code.

From the opinion:

"Because the definitions of event and occurrence do not resolve the issue before us, we must also consider the statutory context"

They talk about this and the exact definitions for basically the entire opinion. It's not just "meh, I felt like it". They are dealing with how these words have been defined in prior statutes.

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