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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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An important thing to keep in mind about Law:

PDF: The Law is a Fractal: The Attempt to Anticipate Everything

For instance, we might consider a municipal park for which a city had adopted the rule, “no vehicles are allowed in the park.” We could treat “Point 1” on the number line as representing the act of driving a car through the park and “Point 2” as representing refraining from driving a car through the park. The rule would assign the label of “illegal” to Point 1 and “legal” to Point 2. ^5

As has been famously pointed out,^6 these two points and the rule itself are insufficient to cover all the specific factual situations that might arise involving vehicles in a park. At least they are insufficient in any reasonable rule system.^7 What if, for example, a police vehicle has to enter the park on an emergency call? If we want an appropriate, specific rule, we would need another point, between Points 1 and 2, corresponding to the factual scenario, “A police vehicle entering the park.” Point 1.5, let’s call it, to which we would assign, like Point 2, the label “legal.” But what if the driver of the car were a thief who had stolen it from the police? That specific scenario would fall between Points 1 and 1.5, perhaps 1.2, and would be assigned the label “illegal.”^8

And so on. Given the numberless potential variations, foreseeable and unforeseeable, in “vehicles,” motives, and circumstances, there can, provably,^9 be no end to the possible specific scenarios—and thus no limit on the number of rules that would result from trying to write an appropriate one for each possible, distinct fact situation.^10

If the Law is not clear then who gets to decide the rule? I don’t think it’s clear that Courts get to. Thinking about the 14th Amendment I don’t think it’s clear the SC gets to make the decision. Jurisdiction has meaning and I don’t see why the SC gets to choose the meaning. Reasonable people can have different meanings.

Ideally the legislature would clarify. I am not sure how this would work with an Amendment. Could a simple bill make the decision or do you need to amend the amendment for clarification? I definitely think the legislature gets first crack at it but I am not sure what process is necessary a bill or amendment to clarify an amendment. If it’s only a bill then you could to limited extent be modify the Constitution whenever the legislature changes.

If the legislature does nothing then who gets to decide the meaning of “Jurisdiction”. I don’t believe the courts should do anything that would be creating policy. The definition of jurisdiction isn’t in the amendment. They have nothing to base a decision.

Absent legislative action then I guess the executive branch gets to define the word and citizenship status is just an executive order. And if your born 2 min before a GOP POTUS leaves you are a non-citizen for life and if your born minutes later your a citizen for life. Legislative or Executive Action each are more Democratic when bills are passed that lack clarity on meaning.

But I do think in most situations you can write legislation that solves 90-95% of cases in footnotes to legislation. A lot of legislation is written very poorly.

Courts are the entities that our system designated to resolve legal ambiguities. Largely for reasons of expediency. Court interpretations of statutes or the constitution can be overridden by the legislature or by amendment but, in the moment, we need someone to decide.

These questions come up in the context of pending cases. Take the example of Wickard below. Whether he was in violation of federal law and must pay a penalty turned on whether his growing wheat was "interstate commerce." If judges are not empowered to answer this question, what does this case look like? Is it put on hold until Congress passes a law? The constitution is amended? Can anyone get their federal prosecution deferred by finding an ambiguity (according to who?) that would require a statutory or constitutional amendment to clarify?

I don’t believe it is clear at all that the courts have the ability to make law on ambiguous texts. In fact courts have recognized this as vague laws are generally not considered constitutional such as the Logan Act.

Historically they have thrown out convictions based on vague laws. In the case of a vague amendment it would seem the power to me would go to the most Democratic branch of government for clarification which would be congress followed by the Executive if Congress does nothing. But yes in this case it would seem to be a sort of constitutional crisis on who has the power.

In the case of the 14th I think they need to punt the case and make it an executive decision otherwise they are overstepping their authority. If the administration violates something that is clear then the SC can claim authority.

If the Law is not clear then who gets to decide the rule?

The jury of one's peers. You can't trace the border of the Mandelbrot set, but you can pick a specific point and, with arbitrarily high probability, decide whether it belongs to it or not.

The jury of one’s peers in our system does not decide the rules. The judge gives juries instructions on the rules. And I don’t believe the judge either gets to “make up the rules” or atleast they shouldn’t. The rules come from the legislator. The question is how interpretive do judges get to be on the “rules” and who actually gets to be the rule maker.

The jury makes deterministic decisions on the the evidence in the case and whether the “rules” given to them were broken. When juries make up the “rules” we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.

we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.

It varies for different definitions of "we", "that", and "allowed".

Perhaps the strongest case for "not allowed" is that juries are given explicit contrary instructions. Perhaps the strongest case for "allowed" is that there's very few other good reasons to conscript a bunch of random unqualified jackasses off the street to make judgement calls about a trial when there's already a highly trained person, literally titled "judge", right there. The "of their peers" bit isn't added to "jury" because legal types hate concision, it's because that part is critical to nullification protecting against laws that seem good to upper class judges but not to the class of people affected.

(Of course, the strongest case for "shouldn't be allowed" is that often upper class people are just more correct about what's good. E.g. it's much harder to protect unpopular rights if anyone criminally retaliating against their exercise might get let off by a jury nullifying the crime, or at least might be impossible to prosecute in the face of hung juries with some members nullifying the crime.)

But I don't have twelve peers. Guess that means I'm the law!

It would seem like we could have a hierarchy of laws. If No Vehicles in the park is a rank 4 law and police may proceed on any available path or road in an emergency with their sirens and lights operating is a rank 3 law then both can coexist because a rank 3 exception supercedes a rank 4 law.

Isn't that part of what the common law system does? A practical hierarchy is created and citations refer back to prior precedent in applying the unwritten hierarchy.

Okay but what about say a wheel chair? It is a vehicle. Maybe you have ADA so perhaps that trumps.

What about stroller?

In law school I asked, "what about shoes?" The professors liked it I suppose.

"what about shoes?"

Does the posted 10mph speed limit on the paved multi-use path apply to Sabastian Sawe out for a morning jog at 13mph?

Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.

Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.

By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.

Great little quiz/game about this https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

It's just in general really difficult to come up with a rule that is

  1. Simple to track and consistently enforce

  2. Covers all potential cases, including adversarial readings.

  3. Doesn't confuse a good number of people with legitimate arguments to how it can be interpreted.

And the fact that nobody's actually able to hold a legislator to account for intentionally writing laws that fail any (or all) of those three conditions; a few laws are clearly designed the way they were to intentionally provoke adversarial readings for power reasons.

Which might not be the point the game's necessarily intending for you to notice, but it is something I feel is pretty apparent- I'd say someone who came up with a law like that while failing to even define terms is incompetent at best, and is the reason anti-social women (and men, but mostly women) feel as entitled as they do to call the cops on someone "driving" an R/C car in the park.

I got 100% on the quiz. Seemed straightforward to me.

My experience as a moderator has definitely colored my opinions on the law and rules. I think the intention and purpose of a law are very important. And the letter of the law is not very important. Also people can violate rules and the authorities can decide 'no punishment'. Thus police car and ambulance are violation of the rule, but not necessarily a punishable violation.

The spirit of a law may be more important than the letter, but nobody bothered writing the spirit down. It's floating around in the ether, formless and powerless. The letter's all we've got.

We wrote down the spirit of the rules in the sidebar here. Many laws are often proceeded by a section dedicated to the purpose of the law.

Some laws are handled in spirit rather than just the letter. Murder is an example. We do not ban all the ways in which you can commit murder.

Honestly I took it and scored 93% in the majority. So the rule seems clear to me.

96% here, and my exception A non-functional vehicle is still a vehicle, a tank is a vehicle, and it still counts when it's part of a monument would have been covered by other permitting and planning work anyways.

Same as me! Actual laws like this usually say "motorized vehicles" which makes almost all of the other quiz questions non-ambiguous, but I guess there'd still be some ambiguity about the tank depending on exactly how it was deactivated.

That does resolve a lot of questions, although different types of bikes available today might leave a few questions: fully electric push-to-go bikes are clearly "motorized"; old-school, er, acoustic bikes aren't, but the case of e-assist bikes, which require pedaling to ride, still seems unclear to me.

By the letter of the law, e-bikes would definitely count -- vehicle (check) with a motor (check). (those scooter things can fuck off too)

The trouble is, boomers and environmentalists like them, and they are running the place!

Then there's bikes with "electronic" (electromechanical) shifting but no non-human motive power. I'm waiting for the day some anti-bike cop busts someone for an e-bike violation over this, and the court (being a "the cop is always right" traffic court) accepts it.

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