They are imperfect and I'm sure you can find much wrong with the courts, but attempting to codify every edge case is not only impossible, but dangerous. The more laws you create, the more likely you can find a way you're breaking one. It's not a perfect system, but a cornerstone of American democracy is that you are judge by people, people like you, not by an algorithm.
We've been reminded again and again by recent events how horribly wrong things can go when the is system is applied to people who are not like the judge/jury/officers/etc. There's got to be a better way than relying on inherently biased people, especially for commonly persecuted groups (minority races/orientations/occupations).
I think when someone says they want an axiomatic or algorithmic legal system, they're saying people are not like them, and they would rather be judged by an algorithm. Also that they would rather know in advance what behaviors will be judged positively or negatively.
I understand this, and if I thought it were possible, I would agree.
However...
The law is essentially trying to codify a moral code, one that changes with time. We've seen how the law struggles with changes to technology, lifestyle and shifting attitudes. But sometimes the very axioms change (see slavery, suffrage, common law). Because the law cannot keep up with changes, we're stuck with messy human interpretation to smooth over some of those rough edges. Something like Brown v. Board of Education, which seems obvious in retrospect, may not have occurred in an axiomatic system (perhaps Plessy v. Ferguson may not have occurred either, though considering the primary axiom that American law is based on once said that blacks were 3/5 of a human, I find that unlikely).
I would argue that we ought to try to introduce algorithms into the enforcement of the law (policing, traffic enforcement, jury selection, public defenders, etc) rather than the interpretation of it. Of course, one could argue mass surveillance is exactly that, so I don't know.
I think my comment was misinterpreted. Our legal system is a part of our government, which is a representative democracy. Part of the idea behind a representative democracy is that it is designed to protect the minority from majority mob rule. By definition, edge cases are cases that fall outside of the normal majority. Our legal system is fuzzy because it is operated by humans, not silicon.
The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward. So in a sense, case law is intended to be the legal equivalent of mathematical proofs in the courtroom. Obviously this analogy isn't 100% correct, but the main reason it can't be is because of the thousands of edge cases that come up in real life...edge cases that are minority cases intended to be protected by representative democracy, but the case law legal system has difficulty actually doing so because of the design of the case law system. See the conflict? Completely lost yet?
>The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward.
Sorry if this comes out as pedantic but I think it is important. Case law is not intended to minimize fuzziness but to address occurrences of fuzziness.
I disagree, I think precedent reduces fuzziness because it shows how the law has been interpreted in the real world.
No cases are identical, but knowing how a similar situation was handled in the past clarifies, not confuses the situation. It gets us closer to a consistent interpretation of the law, which is, in my opinion, paramount because consistency ideally means predictability and equality.
Indeed the roots of the common law go back to making sure all people are viewed equally under the law, rather than having random interpretations based on who's judging and who's being judged.
The design of a case law system however, which the U.S. operates under, is intended to minimize fuzziness by looking at case precedent for guidance on issues moving forward.
But then you go on to speak of edge cases that precedent can't deal with, but I would argue that your view of case law as essentially "algorithmic" is flawed. Obviously precedent cannot be exact, but using prior interpretations helps guide thinking.
For example, look at Katz v. US, one of the seminal cases that would inform this case. In Katz, the court starts with existing law, one that prevents illegal searches, and tries to decide whether that law can apply to electronics (such as tapping a phone). At this point the OCCSSA is in effect, but not really tested, so we've got a pretty fuzzy legal area despite the fact that phones are a well established technology. The court rules that even though law enforcement did not search or seize things, that privacy is still implied in electronic communications because of other acts a user takes surrounding the act of making a phone call (closing the door, making the phone call from home, etc.).
In fact, there's a whole legal concept at work here called lawful intrusion that is built upon every time a case is judged. These concepts, and human application of them to the case at hand, help attorneys, judges and juries deal with edge cases.
> You ever get in a fight where it wasn't 100% clear who was right and who was wrong? You were both a little bit right and a little bit wrong?
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Yes, the world is not black and white, but neither is math.
If you have e.g. a car crash where one person was speeding and the other failed to yield the right of way, they're both at fault. Maybe one is more at fault than the other and therefore has to pay a higher percentage of the damages, but how is that not still an algorithm?
The hard part is designing the right algorithm ahead of time. But throwing up your hands and saying that problem is hard and therefore we should give up on having laws and just let judges decide everything on a case by case basis isn't democracy and isn't the rule of law. It's the rule of whatever the judge says it is today.
It's impossible to design an appropriate algorithm ahead of time capable of accepting all of the possible inputs that might occur.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't do our best. We shouldn't just throw up our hands. But I think it's important to admit that judges will always be necessary to handle inevitable ambiguities.
It's completely possible to design an algorithm that will give a deterministic result in every case. It might not always be the result you want, but a judge might not give the result you want either. And at least with the algorithm the result is predictable (even if not predicted) and, if wrong, can be fixed and then apply consistently in the future without making decisions based on politics or race or personal relationships.
Or to put it another way, we could have an algorithm make the decision but then have a judge whose job it is to find when the algorithm is wrong and then fix it for future but not past/current cases.
> There is a tradeoff between predictability and correctness. Where you come in on that tradeoff is pretty different from most other people.
Because I don't see it as a tradeoff between predictability and correctness, I see it as a tradeoff between correctness for past acts and correctness forever in the future.
If you know a law is ridiculous but you also know that a judge will see the same thing and then not let you do that, you won't do it. Some people like that result. The problem is it causes the ridiculous law to carry on existing and not be fixed, because nobody is willing to challenge it when they know they'll lose and go to jail even though by the letter they shouldn't. So then nobody ever knows what the law actually is because it clearly isn't what it says it is, but if it isn't that then what is it?
