Defining is not hard. You can say "a table is a flat board with four support structures roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in height, built for the purpose of keeping things off the ground". Anything that fits that description is a table, and anything that doesn't, isn't. Supposed tables with three legs, or Japanese tables, aren't tables by this definition; they are something else. Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn't completely encompass a situation is better than a loose guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the guideline will always leave room for bickering about interpretation.
The particular definition isn't as important as long as it doesn't leave room for ambiguity. It could be "a table is anything made of wood" and it wouldn't matter.
>Law is not computer code. There is a reason we have judges and a court system to interpret laws.
I'm of the opinion that the judicial system should be as dumb as possible. It's the legislative system where the real work should happen.
PS: Downvoting does not constitute a counterargument.
The definition of a table does matter a lot, even in law. For example, businesses may deduct purchases of tables from their taxes. It wouldn't be right if a company couldn't deduct a plastic table from their taxes because it wasn't a legal table or if a company could deduct a music box because it was legally a table.
When you start talking about seizing assets then the definition is all that more important.
> PS: Downvoting does not constitute a counterargument
You didn't really give an argument to counter.
In fairness, i didn't really either.
"The particular definition isn't as important as long as it doesn't leave room for ambiguity" is a pretty controversial statement. To me, this seems obviously false. However, i think its kind of like arguing about what makes a good person. Yes you can appeal to certain general principles, but at some level the general principles come down to "because i think so".
As a fundemental principle, i think which behaviours the law forbids and which it does not is important. The purpose of law is to regulate certain behaviors; it is not an exercise in mathematics or formal logic. This seems self-obvious to me, but as a normative claim there is not much i can say to convince you if you disagree.
To that end, i think criminalizing the wrong conduct is worse than mild ambiguity in laws, when the ambiguity can largely be resolved through common sense. I believe the principle of precedent in common law systems combined with the principle that ambiguities should generally be interpreted to benefit the defendent, effectively mitigates the downsides of allowing mild ambiguity.
Do we really want to spend our time in the legal system litigating what a table is? What if I use a chair as a place to set my dinner plate while eating on the sofa? A reasonableness standard is the only practical way to start defining a law. The specifics and edge cases get worked out over time. Otherwise, I can add a fifth center support to my table and now you have to rewrite every law pertaining to tables. Rinse. Repeat.
We have no trouble defining what things are and often do. Granted we don't have a strict definition of a "table", but we do for general furniture/furnishings, on top of which there are standards set by the various federal agencies and import control by the trade departments. Regardless, there can be one tomorrow like so many things provided in the first link.
Some of these are revised as needed, but anyway getting past the point.
Because presumably the laws about the sale, use and disposal of tables-of-mass-consumption where written for a reason, and dodging them by adding or removing a leg would result in criminals getting away with terrible table crimes because of the technicality. Let alone what the police will do to poor students sitting in their “tables” (you know, the ones with four legs and a small horizontal working surface).
Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and thereby subject to additional tariffs.
>dodging them by adding or removing a leg would result in criminals getting away with terrible table crimes because of the technicality
If it's a crime to do X on a "table" and you do X on a not-table, by definition you're not committing a crime. Saying that you're getting away with a crime in such a situation is like saying that you're getting away with a crime by driving your car within the speed limit, whereas if you were an honest criminal and drove a little bit faster the police would be allowed to ticket you. If there are clearly demarcated limits that people are allowed to stay within, it's not a technicality whether you're on one side or the other.
>Let alone what the police will do to poor students sitting in their “tables” (you know, the ones with four legs and a small horizontal working surface).
Sorry, I don't understand the argument.
>Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and thereby subject to additional tariffs.
What the alternative, given that the government wants to tax "professional video equipment" but not "consumer video equipment" and there's a gradient from one to the other?
If adding an extra wheel to your vehicle lets you drive at 120 mph on a 55 mph road, that's not getting away with a crime. It's not a crime. You didn't "get away" with anything. Your modified vehicle is subject to different laws.
Iunno. There could be reasons why it should, there could he reasons why it shouldn't, or it might not matter either way. Maybe the government wants to encourage people to modify their cars to have an extra wheel, and it does so by allowing their drivers to drive faster.
If you want a less contrived example, where I live motorcycles require different licenses depending on their engine displacement, but since electric motorcycles have a displacement of 0, they can be ridden without registration or license. Is this due to oversight or to encourage use of electric motorcycles? Are people who ride electric motorcycles without a license getting away with exploiting a loophole, or are they using the law as intended?
Totally - especially when people are incentivized to try to find loopholes, it's extremely hard to find an airtight definition of anything.
Three wheeled cars used to be made to bypass the definition of what a car is and avoid needing to be subject to crash testing and other safety regulation. My parent's home is a complicated 'single-unit condo' which is as far as I can tell, basically a lie to get past regulations on building new houses.
I guess my point is, if you agree that the law is good then you should not want the definition to be easily bypassed with a loophole, and having something that's flexible helps a lot with this. And if the law is bad then you'll be glad for one though it makes things silly compared to repealing the law.
And if you see someone using a loophole for a law you like, especially if they are doing so in a cheeky way like the billionaires playing games with shell companies to avoid taxes, it's fair to be mad at them even if it's not "technically illegal".
I prefer rigid, clear-cut laws that may be bypassed by loopholes to flexible laws that may be applied at the whim of judges. I worry less about people doing clever tricks to save a few bucks and more about the government abusing loosely-written laws against me.
Not only are there are tables with three legs, but also tables with a single support in the middle, and tables suspended from the ceiling. There are low tables, and high tables. Shelves can also have four support structures (note there's a lot of wiggle room in those two words) of approximately 1m. Such a definition would allow so many loopholes...
The government of Fluoridationia doesn't care about objects that are not legally tables. It will go to your house and charge you a license fee for your shelf-that-is-legally-a-table and ignore the flat round piece of wood you hanged from the ceiling.
This would immediately be useless IRL in cases and is why we try to establish precedence-based definitions of reasonableness. Simple but incomplete definitions work pretty easily in many engineering contexts, especially because you can easily scope the realm that you apply the definition to, but would immediately fall flat in something as large and complex as the legal context.
Honestly the more I study social/political systems, the more obvious it becomes just how much more difficult the problems in that space are than the engineering ones I'm used to...
I disagree. It's not that definitions "fall flat", it's that people don't like the conclusions that are derived from those definitions. If tables are defined as above and are supposed to be taxed at 20% while chairs are taxed at 15%, and someone builds a 1 m-tall chair with three legs and a 1 m^2 seat, that's not in itself a problem. It's only a problem because the government would like that "chair" to be taxed as if it was a table. But a definition can't be incorrect; it's a definition.
> Supposed tables with three legs, or Japanese tables, aren't tables by this definition; they are something else. Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
> Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
Eh? If you're talking about defining a 'table' but something that is clearly a table doesn't fit in your definition, than you failed at what you're trying to do. That is a problem.
There's a difference between what is a "table", and what is legally a table. As an equivalent example, someone who is legally blind may not be blind in the colloquial sense of the word. There are practical reasons why a legal definition may be broader or narrower than the colloquial definition. For example, the legal definition of blindness is broader, to accommodate disabled people who for the purposes of earning a living are as good as completely blind. My definition of table is narrower because I'm just making an example, but if we suppose it to be a real definition, it might be because the government wanted to tax the sales of the most common variety of tables sold, without bothering to deal with the uncommon cases, so it made a simple definition but effective definition without ambiguous cases. The fact that someone might call a table something that is not legally a table is not in itself a problem. It's only a problem if it goes against the purpose of the definition. Like I said in a different reply, the government might want to tax something that is legally not a table as if it was. In such an event, the definition would not be perfectly useful for their purposes.
The problem is that you might be right in the case of this theoretical example, but it doesn't transfer to the real world, because the legal definition is actually meant to represent the real world thing.
Raising tax on 'regular' tables leads to the obvious effect that next all tables will be sold with one extra leg, making them irregular. Therefore people are still selling and using tables except they don't pay any tax on it (which was presumably the point of raising taxes on tables). Also what happens with the definition of 'regular' when the 5-legged tables becomes the norm, and 4-legged rare? Do we amend it to reverse the definition? this would obviously not work.
In the case of a tax on tables you should be unspecific in your definition of a table so that the interpretation of the law becomes simple. There is a tax on tables, no matter what size, what kind, how many legs, etc. It is clear to producers, traders and consumers.
This ultimately makes everything much simpler for everybody. And this also allows lawmakers to only think of the 'spirit' of the law, without having to endlessly debate about what would be a perfect definition for a thing.
All I'm trying to say is that although I kinda think you're right, in that it would be useful if we could reduce law-things to super strict definitions, it would obviously be great if we could do away with lawyers and judges, and replace them with a simple decision trees, but that's just not realistic.
Realisiticaly it works the other way around. It starts of vague, and only gets debated and amended when and if edge-cases show up.
Nowadays lawmakers know so much about previous cases and laws that they kinda figured out how to write laws that are resistant to all the likely edge cases that might pop up, so even simple laws might nowadays start out as relatively complex documents that are strict in the things they can be strict about and loose when that is more advantageous.
Another point that is mildly related is that I personally wonder if it's possible at all to perfectly capture everything about a thought/feeling/concept in writing. Is it possible at all to put something in English on paper, and not have the interpretation of that thing be different for each person reading it?
I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn't completely encompass a situation is better than a loose guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the guideline will always leave room for bickering about interpretation.