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"Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law.

Teever 5y ago
That's some Lawyer-brain legalism thinking right there bro. People with Lawyber-brained legalism on the brain are the ones who write those poorly written laws. “Don't struggle–only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down.”
sethammons 5y ago
I wish there was a better mechanism for intent vs letter of the law. Activist judges can be a real problem, but so can "oh, yeah, but this comma was in the wrong spot, so we are legal!".
- jeltz 5y ago
  Activist judges do not seem to be more common in Europe where intent is generally more important. I do not think focusing on intent significantly enabled activist judges.
elliekelly 5y ago
I disagree. My experience is limited to regulators, not judges, but Europe tends to be much more focused on the spirit of the law compared to America's focus on the letter of the law. The law can (and should!) be flexible. Legislation cannot possibly conceive of every possible fact pattern that might emerge. It's an unrealistic expectation and it would be a waste of effort to try to draft laws that way because they’d either be so specific they'd never apply or they'd be so broadly vague that they'd apply to everyone.
dataflow 5y ago
> "Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law. This isn't 1 person writing 1 law who gets to iterate on it until the bugs are gone. Bandwidth is not exactly abundant here. Before suggesting lawmakers somehow have enough bandwidth to improve every law into perpetuity, I feel like it might be an interesting experiment to try writing software the way law is written (through democratic voting on "amendments" to the codebase, with filibuster and all that fun, with similarly limited ways to kick people out of the group), and to then observe how many times you can feasibly go back to the drawing board to remove bugs and "write better code". And then calculate how much bandwidth you would need if you wanted to produce N products every year, instead of just 1.

Teever 5y ago

That's some Lawyer-brain legalism thinking right there bro. People with Lawyber-brained legalism on the brain are the ones who write those poorly written laws. “Don't struggle–only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down.”

sethammons 5y ago

I wish there was a better mechanism for intent vs letter of the law. Activist judges can be a real problem, but so can "oh, yeah, but this comma was in the wrong spot, so we are legal!".

jeltz 5y ago
Activist judges do not seem to be more common in Europe where intent is generally more important. I do not think focusing on intent significantly enabled activist judges.

elliekelly 5y ago

I disagree. My experience is limited to regulators, not judges, but Europe tends to be much more focused on the spirit of the law compared to America's focus on the letter of the law. The law can (and should!) be flexible. Legislation cannot possibly conceive of every possible fact pattern that might emerge. It's an unrealistic expectation and it would be a waste of effort to try to draft laws that way because they’d either be so specific they'd never apply or they'd be so broadly vague that they'd apply to everyone.

dataflow 5y ago

> "Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law. This isn't 1 person writing 1 law who gets to iterate on it until the bugs are gone. Bandwidth is not exactly abundant here. Before suggesting lawmakers somehow have enough bandwidth to improve every law into perpetuity, I feel like it might be an interesting experiment to try writing software the way law is written (through democratic voting on "amendments" to the codebase, with filibuster and all that fun, with similarly limited ways to kick people out of the group), and to then observe how many times you can feasibly go back to the drawing board to remove bugs and "write better code". And then calculate how much bandwidth you would need if you wanted to produce N products every year, instead of just 1.