Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes? By definition, loopholes are perfectly legal. They may be against the spirit of the law, but they are still legal.
You answered it yourself. They're against the spirit of the law.
In any other circumstance where rules or obligations are enforced, exploiting loopholes is completely unacceptable behaviour.
(To clarify, I'm not arguing that the judge made the wrong decision in this particular case. Instead, I don't think this type of behaviour should be tolerated by the system at all.)
and if you're against the spirit, but find a loophole? you do not technically break the law, and achieve your objectives.
The law maker is at fault, if there are loop holes.
It's very tough to distinguish loopholes that were added accidentally by lawmakers, and loopholes that are added intentionally to appease corporate donors.
A lawmaker isn't legally required to include your provision just because you donated to them.
Taking the idea of wage theft as an example, the spirit of the law is that as a society we typically don't want to be exploited by companies, but there exists no shortage of capitalists who are against the spirit of that suite of laws. I would call them antagonists to those ideals of society.
It would be interesting to hear about a law who's spirit you are against, and to try and match it up with a societal ideal. I can't come with anything myself right now. Perhaps weed? It's still mostly illegal here, but I think many courts in this day and age would be lenient, as it becomes clear that society's ideals have changed in that area.
(edit: I edited this comment a lot as my thoughts evolved on it, sorry if anyone caught it mid-edit)
This is not right. If the spirit of the law is obvious, write it down.
Otherwise you're just advocating for people having to know the letter of the law (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money), and the spirit of the law, whatever that is.
If a state's only job in this regard is to write down some rules that let it get free money from workers, it should take responsibility for writing the rules down properly.
Writing down law that would close loopholes with specificity is bad for business, which has symbolically been expanded to include other skin colors and genders so it can be argued the people having their agency back is actually regressing gains for some (gains in an intentionally manipulated ledger of exchange value thanks to loopholes).
Never mind the industrial mess threatens the species. The tribal fractal anyone happens to live in must never change!
It’s become a truism we want this because no alternatives are allowed to be.
You simply can't codify everything, just like in software, there are bugs in law, and people will take advantage in weird and unusual ways. Courts come in and remedy the outcome of the bug, and that ruling is used in future cases to make better decisions, so you can consider that a hotfix.
> (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money)
The literal law is to not pay people below Australia's legal minimum wage. It's not a "target wage", so going over it is obviously not relevant, it is the bare minimum. The spirit of that suite of laws is to stop companies from exploiting workers.
No, your lawmakers made overly complex, bad laws.
Probably not because a lot of societal norms are regulated by shame and shared ideas of decency. This decision was made by a person or small group of people inside Amazon. Maybe those people wouldn’t have made that decision if their identities could become public?
it should be acceptable.
> a lot of societal norms are regulated by shame and shared ideas of decency.
and i think that's wrong - if it's not a good idea to perform certain actions, then enshrine it in law, and explicitly say it's not alright to do.
There is a saying: "Legislate in haste, perish at leisure". Not all things should require legislation, and those that are to be legislated should be fully and thoroughly considered. Often times it can be best to rely upon the moral will of society to impart a desired action than it is to strictly enforce compliance with that action. Its not perfect, but neither hard-line or soft-line is.
This seems like deliberate silliness. Someone somewhere is writing down rules about how much money they get from you. If you don't obey the rules you get locked up. If you do obey the rules you don't. This isn't about doing things not specifically illegal; this is about how it's okay to obey the rules someone wrote down.
late Middle English (in the sense ‘dependent on one's will or pleasure, discretionary’): from Latin arbitrarius, from arbiter ‘judge, supreme ruler’, perhaps influenced by French arbitraire .
Literally comes from the Latin word for a judge!
The whole industry is screwed. And I'm a hypocrite because I order stuff online as well.
As long as you can bribe - oops sorry I meant donate to your local politician(s) to keep these 'perfectly legal' laws intact...