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Comment by chrisbrandow | Hacker News Reader

The answer to the question, "does a consumer think that beef with a USA label might have come from another country?" is obviously "No"

But there is a certain type of Lawyer-brain legalism that has infected our courts, and I don't know of a good solution. But you get this kind of obvious perverse result where it just defies common sense. In that sense, I can understand how lawyers and judges looked at whatever laws that define what each part of a "product", "of", "USA" means and concluded, that yes, imported beef can technically be "Product of USA"

I'm so sick of this.

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"Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law.

That's some Lawyer-brain legalism thinking right there bro.

People with Lawyber-brained legalism on the brain are the ones who write those poorly written laws.

“Don't struggle–only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down.”

I wish there was a better mechanism for intent vs letter of the law. Activist judges can be a real problem, but so can "oh, yeah, but this comma was in the wrong spot, so we are legal!".

Activist judges do not seem to be more common in Europe where intent is generally more important. I do not think focusing on intent significantly enabled activist judges.

I disagree. My experience is limited to regulators, not judges, but Europe tends to be much more focused on the spirit of the law compared to America's focus on the letter of the law. The law can (and should!) be flexible. Legislation cannot possibly conceive of every possible fact pattern that might emerge. It's an unrealistic expectation and it would be a waste of effort to try to draft laws that way because they’d either be so specific they'd never apply or they'd be so broadly vague that they'd apply to everyone.

> "Lawyer-brain legalism" describes the right way to interpret law, though. The way to fix it isn't to be flexible about the law, but to write better law.

This isn't 1 person writing 1 law who gets to iterate on it until the bugs are gone. Bandwidth is not exactly abundant here.

Before suggesting lawmakers somehow have enough bandwidth to improve every law into perpetuity, I feel like it might be an interesting experiment to try writing software the way law is written (through democratic voting on "amendments" to the codebase, with filibuster and all that fun, with similarly limited ways to kick people out of the group), and to then observe how many times you can feasibly go back to the drawing board to remove bugs and "write better code". And then calculate how much bandwidth you would need if you wanted to produce N products every year, instead of just 1.

In my country, Sweden, this is much less of a problem since we put more emphasis on the spirit of the law which reduces the amount of lawyer-brain legalism. I think the US also should move more towards spirit of the law over letter of the law.

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