First I'd consider it from the angle of legislator intent, instead of attributing compulsion to an abstract concept (law). The question is then much closer to

First I'd consider it from the angle of legislator intent, instead of attributing compulsion to an abstract concept (law). The question is then much closer to reality: "Am I behaving in a way that pleases the legislators?" That is a very difficult question to answer, and the solution was to codify the wants of the legislators into laws :) Unsurprisingly the process of translating the desires from the minds of men (and a few women) onto paper does not completely eliminate logical defects that pretty much everybody hosts. So you end up with contradictory laws, our solution was to add another layer of human reasoning onto that - the judicial system. Anyway, playing the game of finding loopholes and ignoring the 'spirit of the law' is the only reasonable course of action. The alternative, restricting your behavior to what you think the legislators would approve of - well, that would be an incredibly terrible existence... It would be an interesting project to translate our system of laws into Attempto Controlled English [0], while feeding the results into a logical reasoner. I don't think it would be long before you find serious flaws where the logic does not follow. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English