A lot of people believe that the law operates kind of like magic, and that if you can check the right boxes then the government just has do do whatever thing yo

A lot of people believe that the law operates kind of like magic, and that if you can check the right boxes then the government just has do do whatever thing you think checking those boxes will make them do. This isn't the case, of course. The way-off-the-deep-end extreme version of this thinking is the SovCit movement, the adherents of which seem to believe, contrary to all sense and evidence, that the right words spoken (or written) in the right order can eliminate the ability of the government to enforce its laws on a given person—that the government is in fact well bound (by whom? Who enforces this?) by some arcane set of well-hidden rules that, if you know how to correctly invoke them, gives you exceptional power over it. As if the government is some kind of rules-bound genie or magic mirror or something. However, weaker versions of this are common. If you've found someone who talks a lot about "technicalities" in legal cases, you're probably dealing with someone who operates under at least a partial misunderstanding of how the law works—that is, they very likely believe that finding little "gotchas" is way more powerful a tactic than it actually is. I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of people who think religious exemptions work a lot more broadly than they actually do, and that all you need is to get an ordained minister of some sort to sign off, and that's that, the government has to let you do what you want, and if they don't then that must represent some awful and dangerous break from the norm. Meanwhile, that's not how it works at all.