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Comment by boomshucka | Hacker News Reader

Which part isn't clear?

All of the parts are unclear. I'm confused because the objectivity of a law depends on the facts in court cases being in dispute?

When I use the word subjective, it means that an individual personally gets to decide the truth of something. You can't make something illegal just by changing your mind, but you can make it immoral. We probably have different understandings of subjectivity and objectivity.

Inconveniently, juries (and judges in non-criminal cases) do, in fact, make something legal or illegal by changing their minds. It is the function of a jury to decide questions of fact, because determining absolute objective truth in a courtroom scenario (from a scientific sense of the word) is often functionally impossible. So you're left with the situation where the plaintiff and defendant provide evidence that their respective versions of the truth are the objective reality, and the jury's subjective opinion of their case determines what the law agrees upon as objective.

This interface between objective and subjective is the "magic" of the legal system. If you can argue in a court of law, successfully enough to convince a jury (or judge, depending on the criminal / civil nature of the case), that, say for instance, a corporation is a person in the same sense as an individual human being, then as far as the law is concerned it is now an objective truth that corporations are people.

I'm not even talking about deciding questions of fact. If you take a set of facts as a given, it's still often not clear if something is legal or not. Legislation is often written in broad strokes and it is up to the courts to fill in the details. There are always new cases coming up that don't fit the same fact pattern as existing cases and hence no one is quite sure what the law says on such matter.

Given a set of facts, it isn't always clear if something is legal or not. Hence, case law, and appeals and so on. Was obamacare illegal? It wasn't clear. A judgement has been made at this point, but to suggest it was an "objective" decision wouldn't be accurate. The supreme court judges could have just "decided" it was illegal if that was their opinion. Several did. The very existence of the supreme courts highlights the fact that the law is a subjective thing, there isn't some nice big leather bound book which you can just consult for every single situation and go "yep, ok, that's legal".

I see what you're saying, somebody has to decide what the law actually is. They do it in collaboration with a huge system of legal training, case law, appointment, election, and the opinions of other judges, but that a single person's opinion counts for so much does introduce subjectivity. Obama makes decisions, but half of us (or whatever) agreed that it was good for him to do so. We place a similar confidence in scientists.

I generally think of a continuum where 100% subjective means only you agree and 100% objective means everybody on the planet agrees. Questions of legality tend towards the objective side of the continuum, and questions of morality tend towards the subjective side. Very little is at either end of it. (Maybe ice cream is 98% objectively delicious or something.) It would have helped if I clarified this before just spitting out that laws != morals because objective != subjective.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that right now, this very second, there are many things which may or may not be legal, it's uncertain. There are circumstances where (usually) companies will get legal advice from a top-tier firm, and that advice will be "we are not certain if this is legal or not", because there are no cases where this has been tested. This is more common than you might realize. It comes up often where new legislation is passed. Dodd-Frank introduced legislation and none of it had been tested in court and many banks didn't know if X was legal or not, because the legislation didn't explicitly say anything about X, but X might be covered under Y which is explicitly said to be legal or not. There are companies doing things right now and they aren't certain if what they are doing is legal.

Your personal opinion about whether a piece of untested legislation is good or bad according to your own morals/values/ethics is more subjective than a judge's legal opinion about what that legislation means in terms of regulating behavior in accordance with everything else in the legal system.

Agreed, the law is less subjective. But that isn't even close to making the law objective.

Okay, so compare and contrast with science. Is it fair to say that murder is to Dodd-Frank what classical mechanics is to string theory? By the way, thanks for the discussion so far.

I don't know. Classical mechanics is useful but has proven to be wrong in various places, I don't know how useful string theory is but, at least to my knowledge, it has never been proven wrong. Whether a set of facts adds up to "murder" is debatable and what is and is not legal under Dodd-Frank is also debatable.

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