4 ms·

My claim is that there isn't a remotely clear place to put a line between honest research and sifting through the garbage, and if you try and force the court to

My claim is that there isn't a remotely clear place to put a line between honest research and sifting through the garbage, and if you try and force the court to draw the line it will instantly become impossibly convoluted and inefficient, so that no non-lawyer could possibly know what's legal, and would not at all track the moral and efficiency principles we want. (The fact that courts have been put in this position in the past is not a good reason to do it again.) Like, shouldn't the legislators/regulators do as much line-drawing as possible beforehand, as part of the democratic process? Leaving things up to the court is defensible when the ambiguities are unforeseeable or impossibly numerous, but neither apply here.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
> there isn't a remotely clear place to put a line > Leaving things up to the court is defensible when the ambiguities are unforeseeable or impossibly numerous, but neither apply here. It appears you said one thing, and then the opposite. Was that intentional? As it makes your comment seem internally inconsistent. If there isn’t a clear line, how will legislators set demarcation points that people won’t argue in court?
- jessriedel 7y ago
  No, it's not inconsistent, although I can see why it reads that way. Currently, you are proposing to draw a line between two cases, A and B. One is intuitively bad (to some people), the other is intuitively good. If we all agreed that the line absolutely needed to be drawn somewhere between them, and if we also agreed that there was no clear way to draw it, we'd have no choice but to pick some vague language and just trust judges to apply good judgement. (This is often the case when laws appeal to what a "reasonable" person would think.) However, I am suggesting that we simply not draw the line between A and B and have them both be legal because: (1) The "bad" one is actually not that bad, both morally and efficiency-wise, especially when we clearly announce "this behavior is going to be legal, so everyone needs to be careful and protect themselves"; and (2) there are other places to draw the line that are not so hopelessly disputable. Since I am suggesting we put the line somewhere else where it can be made unambiguous, we are not forced to rely (nearly as much) on court interpretation.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

> there isn't a remotely clear place to put a line > Leaving things up to the court is defensible when the ambiguities are unforeseeable or impossibly numerous, but neither apply here. It appears you said one thing, and then the opposite. Was that intentional? As it makes your comment seem internally inconsistent. If there isn’t a clear line, how will legislators set demarcation points that people won’t argue in court?

jessriedel 7y ago
No, it's not inconsistent, although I can see why it reads that way. Currently, you are proposing to draw a line between two cases, A and B. One is intuitively bad (to some people), the other is intuitively good. If we all agreed that the line absolutely needed to be drawn somewhere between them, and if we also agreed that there was no clear way to draw it, we'd have no choice but to pick some vague language and just trust judges to apply good judgement. (This is often the case when laws appeal to what a "reasonable" person would think.) However, I am suggesting that we simply not draw the line between A and B and have them both be legal because: (1) The "bad" one is actually not that bad, both morally and efficiency-wise, especially when we clearly announce "this behavior is going to be legal, so everyone needs to be careful and protect themselves"; and (2) there are other places to draw the line that are not so hopelessly disputable. Since I am suggesting we put the line somewhere else where it can be made unambiguous, we are not forced to rely (nearly as much) on court interpretation.