News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.
If the letter of the law doesn't capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn't be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.
If there's a loophole a lawyer will be there.
If the law says you can't kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
Humans are a (I'll give you flawed) part of the system for good reason, and it isn't so the exact letter of the law can be enforced. The point should always be to understand what the law is trying to accomplish, and enforce that in the most consistent and unsurprising way possible.
This is necessary even when the exact letter of the law is spelled out because times change, and it's unreasonable to expect every law to be updated for every edge case. Airplanes aren't driven into anybody, but they're piloted. "Your honor, I did not drive into my ex-wife, I flew into my ex-wife, which the law says nothing about!"
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances... in other words shit happens. Should a person who stole a car to chase after a burglar be punished the same as someone who stole a car to rob a bank? Should a person who broke the speed limit trying to get their pregnant wife to the hospital while she was bleeding out be subject to the same punishment as a person who broke the speed limit joy riding?
Moreover, the spirit of the law is not about what someone feels the law should mean, it's about what the law is intended mean in the eyes of a reasonable person after consideration of arguments, and a thorough review of the history behind the law. All "letters of the law" are up for interpretation as all language is merely the expression and then interpretation of another's intent. If this wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a word for a "miscommunication."
EDIT: I'd like to add the need to read a law inclusively vs exclusively and how that applies to its interpretation. For example...
A strict letter of the law interpretation read inclusively of the second amendment would imply that everyone has the right to their own private arsenal of nukes. A strict letter of the law interpretation read exclusively of the same text would imply that everyone's right to bear arms only extends to muskets and other weaponry that existed at the time when it was written. The point being, context matters, a lot.
It depends on how it's defined in the law. States generally don't write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn't defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn't.
I'm not even saying that it's impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers -- the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That's basically the parallel to what's being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn't given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can't enact a particular law or even that you can't allow for enforcement to be adaptive -- it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It's totally okay if the law says "it depends and here's who decides." It's not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of "this is what I feel like the law should do" even if the actual language of the law doesn't support it.
You sound like someone who would date a child, but it's fine because you didn't do anything sexual until it was legal.
Weird example...
But it's totally legal by the letter of the law! See, it's a really stupid fucking argument now isn't it?
He doesn't sound like a republican to me.
Guy defending making a weapon near fully automatic to skirt the letter of the law, not republican? Sounds pretty Republican.
The dude didn't even speak about weapons in his comment, he simply said the judicial branch isn't supposed to enforce laws based on what they should have been written but as they are. It's the fault of the legislative branch that the only legislation they have to tackle this problem is from the 1930s, but that doesn't mean the courts are allowed to enforce what law should mean when it's written in a legally explicit way, that's a form of legislation from the bench. All of that is simply just how the judicial branch works, it seemed to me much more an explanation than a defense.
Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.
To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.
That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.
A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.
If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?
That's why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we're playing by and can work to change them.
If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.
tl;dr - we shouldn't do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.