4 ms·

If laws can just change without a new law modifing it then you will never know if you are following the law.

• pyuser583 5y ago
  Or if people in power are following the law.
• pxc 5y ago
  You can't ever just read the law and know what it means, because law, unlike a formal system, is written in natural language (a semantically open system) and interacts with the real world, so it requires non-trivial interpretation. To make the law more predictable, a notion of 'precedent' is used to help make future interpretations adhere to past ones, lending some continuity to all this. But this means that an interpretation of a law in a new context can partially determine what that law means without modifying the text of the law. Abandoning the notion of precedent might avoid that, but it just makes the law unpredictable in other ways.
  • _-david-_ 5y ago
    I guess if that is what you mean than I would generally agree with you. The way I interpreted your post was that you were saying a law should just be changed by the whims of the populace without a proper process in place.
    • pxc 5y ago
      In our case, the whims of the populace are mediated by judges, whose consideration for popular feeling is often limited to something like 'will there be uncontrollable riots if I rule a certain way', and balanced against their ideological views (about how to interpret law) and the content of the law. But I think that element of consideration of popular feeling or shifting cultural norms is important. It's what lets judges do things like pass over laws banning women from wearing pants as a form of crossdressing instead of requiring, or to reinterpret language about equality as extending to wider groups of people than originally intended.