Comment by bsbechtel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsbechtel | Hacker News Reader

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I think my comment was misinterpreted. Our legal system is a part of our government, which is a representative democracy. Part of the idea behind a representative democracy is that it is designed to protect the minority from majority mob rule. By definition, edge cases are cases that fall outside of the normal majority. Our legal system is fuzzy because it is operated by humans, not silicon.

The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward. So in a sense, case law is intended to be the legal equivalent of mathematical proofs in the courtroom. Obviously this analogy isn't 100% correct, but the main reason it can't be is because of the thousands of edge cases that come up in real life...edge cases that are minority cases intended to be protected by representative democracy, but the case law legal system has difficulty actually doing so because of the design of the case law system. See the conflict? Completely lost yet?

>The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward.

Sorry if this comes out as pedantic but I think it is important. Case law is not intended to minimize fuzziness but to address occurrences of fuzziness.

I disagree, I think precedent reduces fuzziness because it shows how the law has been interpreted in the real world.

No cases are identical, but knowing how a similar situation was handled in the past clarifies, not confuses the situation. It gets us closer to a consistent interpretation of the law, which is, in my opinion, paramount because consistency ideally means predictability and equality.

Indeed the roots of the common law go back to making sure all people are viewed equally under the law, rather than having random interpretations based on who's judging and who's being judged.

From my parent comment:

The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward.

Aren't we in agreement?

But then you go on to speak of edge cases that precedent can't deal with, but I would argue that your view of case law as essentially "algorithmic" is flawed. Obviously precedent cannot be exact, but using prior interpretations helps guide thinking.

For example, look at Katz v. US, one of the seminal cases that would inform this case. In Katz, the court starts with existing law, one that prevents illegal searches, and tries to decide whether that law can apply to electronics (such as tapping a phone). At this point the OCCSSA is in effect, but not really tested, so we've got a pretty fuzzy legal area despite the fact that phones are a well established technology. The court rules that even though law enforcement did not search or seize things, that privacy is still implied in electronic communications because of other acts a user takes surrounding the act of making a phone call (closing the door, making the phone call from home, etc.).

In fact, there's a whole legal concept at work here called lawful intrusion that is built upon every time a case is judged. These concepts, and human application of them to the case at hand, help attorneys, judges and juries deal with edge cases.

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