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I would disagree with you, because "technical compliance" is compliance with the letter of the law. You have complied with every explicit requirement of the la

I would disagree with you, because "technical compliance" is compliance with the letter of the law. You have complied with every explicit requirement of the law. If the law is insufficient then legislature is free to add a clause that bans whatever aspect you technically comply with that they don't like. The alternative is complying with the spirit of the law, which is an eternal guessing game. Who knows whether it's legal or not, we have to wait for the Supreme Court to decide what Congress _actually_ meant. It implies that the law means something beyond what anybody bothered to actually write down, and nobody has any idea what that is until the Judiciary interprets it into "actual law".

tshaddox 25d ago
Law isn’t code. There’s no mechanical decision procedure. That’s both impossible and undesirable.
- everforward 24d ago
  I don’t expect it to be exact or like code, but at the very least I expect it to be predictable and the “spirit of the law” fails that test often. I still remember GDPR coming out and I read til my head hurt, decided the lawyers would have to figure it out. Then legal shows up and says they don’t really know either, we’re going to do X and hope someone else gets sued first so they can see what the court thinks the spirit of the law is. Similar issues happened with opiates. They get overprescribed, DEA cracks down and says they’ll publish prescribing guidelines, then never does so everyone is left running on vague “as much as is necessary and justifiable” type verbiage. Can you keep raising levels to keep pace with a rising tolerance? Does that only apply to terminal patients where addiction is less of a worry? What’s the bar for them to be justifiable? Discomfort, pain, debilitating pain? Both cases end in people who are genuinely trying to comply with the law being unsure of what compliance even is. And the courts generally won’t take a hypothetical “is it a crime or not under this law if I did X?”. You have to just do it and accept it for the Schrodingers Cat it is. It’s both illegal and legal until the judiciary opens the box and decides it was one or the other for sure.
  - tshaddox 23d ago
    It's not clear to me why "predictability" should be a major goal. I'd say the goal should always be fairness. Of course, we want the letter of the law to describe what is and isn't fair, and for the law the be changed when it is either unclear or unfair. But here's a question that might elucidate any major differences in our views if they exist: Do you think that a judge should ever pass a judgement that he or she believes to be unfair?

tshaddox 25d ago

Law isn’t code. There’s no mechanical decision procedure. That’s both impossible and undesirable.

everforward 24d ago
I don’t expect it to be exact or like code, but at the very least I expect it to be predictable and the “spirit of the law” fails that test often. I still remember GDPR coming out and I read til my head hurt, decided the lawyers would have to figure it out. Then legal shows up and says they don’t really know either, we’re going to do X and hope someone else gets sued first so they can see what the court thinks the spirit of the law is. Similar issues happened with opiates. They get overprescribed, DEA cracks down and says they’ll publish prescribing guidelines, then never does so everyone is left running on vague “as much as is necessary and justifiable” type verbiage. Can you keep raising levels to keep pace with a rising tolerance? Does that only apply to terminal patients where addiction is less of a worry? What’s the bar for them to be justifiable? Discomfort, pain, debilitating pain? Both cases end in people who are genuinely trying to comply with the law being unsure of what compliance even is. And the courts generally won’t take a hypothetical “is it a crime or not under this law if I did X?”. You have to just do it and accept it for the Schrodingers Cat it is. It’s both illegal and legal until the judiciary opens the box and decides it was one or the other for sure.
- tshaddox 23d ago
  It's not clear to me why "predictability" should be a major goal. I'd say the goal should always be fairness. Of course, we want the letter of the law to describe what is and isn't fair, and for the law the be changed when it is either unclear or unfair. But here's a question that might elucidate any major differences in our views if they exist: Do you think that a judge should ever pass a judgement that he or she believes to be unfair?