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Well, the laws in civil law countries that practice legal literalism are not open to interpretation. Eastern Europe, much of which is a part of the EU, is quite
by caseyy 2y ago
Well, the laws in civil law countries that practice legal literalism are not open to interpretation. Eastern Europe, much of which is a part of the EU, is quite literalist.
The understanding is that interpreting laws leads to bias, partiality, and injustice; while following the letter of the law equally in each situation is the most just approach.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI don't believe that's even possible — I'd love to see an example. How do you define anything 100% literally, 100% unambiguously? You'd have to include the entire language in your definition for a start, and keep that constantly updated.
- caseyy 2y agoLithuanian laws are a good example. They are extremely verbose compared to most common law countries. I lived in Lithuania for a while and at the time, there was a big national debate about how “family” should be defined in laws — what people it can and can’t include. So yes — a lot of emphasis is put on verbose definitions in literalist legal texts. And very very verbose explanations of many edge cases, too, I know first hand it will be very hard to read Lithuanian legal texts for someone who is not a native speaker of the language, and even for natives it’s a challenge. So you could instead google “literalist legal systems”, and I believe you’ll find at least some examples/more context in English somewhere.
- saagarjha 2y agoInterpreting the law literally is very easy to do in a biased way: you just pick and choose when to do it.