From: "Andrew McGlashan" on 7 March, 2013 8:20:54 PM
When the law is mis-written and the defendant gets off with the loophole or other reason for the mis-written law, then it is up the the parliamentray system to correct the law so that it cannot be mis-interpretted again.
Especially in our area (IT) has a lot of examples where this approach would not work that well. In IT things are developing faster than any legislature can catch up with. Think about ways of copying and distribution art work (e.g. movies and music), media regulation if media goes online, what actually is a "newspaper" or a TV station or.. Any way to legislate it in a hurry will fail, having judges able to interpret the "spirit of the law" is the best you can hope for, I think. My naive understanding is, that the Anglo-Saxon system is more flexible here because it is relying much more on older cause cases to come to a conclusion, so it relies less on the legislation finding every loophole as e.g. the German system provides. The AFL seems to be a pretty good example where micromanagement of rules fails because it always finds clever coaches to find a loophole and playing "against the spirit of the game". Another approach would be leaving it to the umpires to ref the game according to their interpretation of the "spirit of the game". Cannot be worse that having to make a decision in a second based on ten if this then that rules. Regards Peter