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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Quite a lot of the law is "semantic definitions" in the sense you're using the term. Things like intent and external circumstances are pretty typical for legal systems to take into account. If you're looking for the law to be mathematically pure, then this might be a problem, but if you're looking for the law to be flexible enough to handle real-world circumstances while still having some enforcement power that can be agreed upon, this is a feature, not a bug.

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Yeah I'm an attorney and I post here a bit and it's always shocking to me that a lot of people here don't realize this. The idea that society would be better off banning insurance because it's like gambling is a severely incomplete thought. Really getting caught up in the broadest view possible, while disregarding all of the key details. It's entirely opposite to the approach taken by the law, which is to examine the key details to determine what actually is happening, and not get too caught up in labels.

For reasons I still don't understand, a lot of engineering-minded people seem to think the law is trying to be math and doing a bad job at it, when as far as I'm able to understand, it's actually just very much not trying to be math by design. I have no legal training of any sort, so it certainly doesn't require any sort of specialized knowledge to understand this, just having humility and being open-minded enough to recognize that my own expertise is not necessarily relevant to understanding how a system designed for an entirely different domain works.

It's an absurd proposition. Come up with words that capture every single possibility and what should be done about it? That's not possible. Even in programming, you capture the exceptions categorically, not necessarily individually. Building nets to catch errors, not rules to deal with every single scenario that could EVER be possible.

And then they rant about patents! Like it should be easy to come up with a pithy statement that is meant to delineate what should be protectable from what shouldn't for EVERYTHING that has yet to be invented! Like that's a trivial task!

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