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Court opinion
Premise: You own some oceanfront land. You want to build on that land a 15,000-ft2, 24-room hotel 60 feet from the water.
Problem: The land is zoned exclusively for single-family houses. Hotels are forbidden.
Solution: "Hotel? What are you talking about? This is just my vacation home. And, if I should happen to rent out some rooms on AirBnB later, there is no ordinance preventing me from doing so." The state Department of Insurance disagrees, but the state Building Code Council overturns the Department's decision and agrees that, under the state's definition, this building does count as a single-family house.
Problem: Only 5,000-ft2 structures can be built 60 feet from the water. 15,000-ft2 structures are forbidden.
Solution: "15,000 ft2? What are you talking about? My house is composed of three 5,000-ft2 structures, structurally independent from each other, and connected only by air-conditioned hallways." The county zoning board agrees that, under the county's definition, this does count as a single-family house composed of three separate 5,000-ft2 structures.
Problem: A disgruntled neighbor appeals the zoning board's ruling to the state courts, which overturn the zoning board's ruling and decide that this is not a valid single-family house under the county's definition. (Under the county's definition, a single-family house can consist of one principal structure and other accessory structures. But in this case all the structures are the same size, so they count as three principal structures, and that is forbidden.)
Solution: The state legislature enacts a law explicitly stating that a county's definition of "building" or "dwelling" cannot override the state Building Code Council's definition. Accordingly, the federal courts overturn the state courts' ruling and agree that the county definition of "single-family house" is void, the Building Code Council's decision controls, and—13 years later—your hotel definitely is legal.
This is precisely why I think courts should have a "return to legislator" option, at least for future cases if not for the current one. Rather than have a war between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and being forced to either ignore the spirit, or mangle the language of the letter until it fits what you think the law should be, this should be a case where the judge goes "Hey, lawmakers, we found a bug in your code, fix it!"
Now, it would be unfair for the people involved here for the law to suddenly change on them mid-court battle, and their own case should be decided based on the law as written, but the law could update for future cases.
In this particular case, the obvious solution is to adjust the "single-family" zoning law to prohibit renting to more than a single family at a time. You can build your 24 room "single family house", good luck finding single families that will pay you enough to recoup your costs when renting in series instead of in parallel.
Legislators are free to update legislation anytime they feel like it, they don't need special permission from the judiciary. And I think I have heard of cases where the Supreme Court recommends Congress update relevant laws in the end. The trouble is that leglistatures can be very disagreeable and unable to pass a law, so how to actually govern gets left to the courts while the legislature is deadlocked.
Technically they could and should do it on their own, but clearly they don't, so some sort of handholding might help. Like, if the court could formally submit the law to the legislators with the specific part highlighted as being ambiguous or exploitable, and the case motivating this as an example, and then the legislature must handle it in a timely manner to clarify their intent. Given them an option to say "we endorse this exactly as written, even in light of the example you've submitted with it, the law needs no changes", but if they have to explicitly vote for that publicly then it removes a bunch of the status quo bias that lets these loopholes exist for so long. And also have a system where if the legislature ignores the bill entirely or can't come to a consensus on it then the court publicly admonishes them for being incompetent or something symbolic that doesn't give the courts any actual power beyond what they already have, but makes the legislators look bad publicly when they make stupid laws.
And limit the court's ability to do this to a certain number of times per year or per law or something to prevent activist judges from just harassing legislators with laws they disagree with. But I mostly just want a fastforward button on the existing "law runs into trouble in court -> legislators notice and care -> legislators fix law -> courts can do sane things without having to abuse language" process. And then maybe use this as an excuse to crack down on courts abusing language and bending laws towards what they think was intended instead of what it literally says. Just always do what it literally says and if you think the intent was different ask the legislature to make them match.
I don't think that'd actually do anything, both sides would just blame the opposing side for being partisan in refusing to update the law to their own preference.
A system I've seen casually proposed that's somewhat related that I like the sound of that for every law on the books, some legislater needs to take responsibility for it and say "That's my law", and at any time that legislater has the power to repeal the law if no one else is willing to step up and claim responsibility for it. That way if there's an outdated law, it gets repealed automatically when the legislater leaves office if no one's willing to take it up. And every legislater needs to think carefully about the laws they take responsibility for, because if it causes some big problem, the blame will be on them personally.
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