> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt.
This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests.
"Letter of the law" often leads to harsh results when the law is drafted poorly, because if they wrote something dumb then you get something dumb instead of a judge rewriting the law to make people happy. But the people they're making happy are usually the powerful, so pick your poison.
The difference is this: If you use the letter of the law, an ordinary person has the same chance to find a loophole as the rich. Which will tend to cause them to get closed, because the rich have more money but ordinary people are more numerous, and the ability for ordinary people to exploit them would pressure the government to fix them.
Sometimes this would make the law more complicated, because the situation has intrinsic complexity and you have to enumerate the edge cases. Sometimes it would make the law simpler, because the existing complexity is extraneous and only an opportunity for gamesmanship. But either way it creates an evolutionary pressure for improvement.
No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie).
It’s also important to remember that societies naturally undergo shifts over time. It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the time have shifted; you’ll just be constantly arguing over the updates to add. Any law written perfectly today becomes imperfect simply through the passage of time. That’s why the Bible and any prescriptive religious text feels so outdated on many recommendations - it’s a snapshot in time of the values of a culture but those values change. There was even a fantastic sci-fi short story on this exact point of cultural shift [1] that’s worth a read.
> No law can ever be written to capture every possible application of the underlying spirit. Thus your ability to escape the spirit is directly correlated with how many lawyers you can hire to find loopholes in the text (or just flat out lie).
The assumption here is that the rules would be complicated and provide lots of opportunities for gamesmanship. Now suppose the rule is "no company shall have more than 30% market share in any market, any that does shall be broken into no fewer than twelve independent pieces."
No loopholes, if you exceed 30% market share you get broken up. And if they find a loophole then you amend the law and take it out.
> It’s impossible to continuously update a codified set of laws when the underlying moirés of the time have shifted; you’ll just be constantly arguing over the updates to add.
That's just politics. Somehow you need a process to decide what the law should be. The output of that process is the new law. If the output sucks then get a new process. But whether people can agree on what the law should be is a separate issue than whether we should even know what the law as enacted is supposed to mean.
> That’s why the Bible and any prescriptive religious text feels so outdated on many recommendations - it’s a snapshot in time of the values of a culture but those values change.
That's fine, nobody is saying that you can't change the law if a case comes out in a bad way. But it should be the legislature rather than the courts to do it, and the new understanding shouldn't be applied to past behavior ex post facto.
Please clearly define the meaning of “you” in your simple law.
Literally me? Okay, I don’t own 50% of the market—my company does.
Oh you mean my company? Okay, my company doesn’t own 50% of the market—each of my companies only control 25%.
Oh you mean me and my companies? Okay, well I only own one company and my wife owns the other one.
Oh you mean… I think you get the point…
Now move on to all the other words you used: what defines a “market”? What does “broken” mean here? What does “independent” mean here? I’m sure it’s quite clear to you—that you know it when you see it. I’m also quite sure others have different interpretations.
I agree with the spirit of your comment otherwise, but simple laws rapidly become complex laws because people are complicated and language is flawed.
That isn't a loophole, it is an interpretation. It isn't possible to have laws without an assumption that a reasonable person is interpreting them (which is 95% of the reasons why judges are involved).
But we know that the interpretation phase has a lot of wiggle room (the US constitution is a regular parade of this sort of thing - the Roe v. Wade fight or the abuse of the commerce clause for example). When they go bad these things aren't loopholes as much as they are just ignoring the written law with a polite fiction and it is up to different interest groups to work out where the power lies to get what they want. Political reality vs. the theoretical rule of law ideal.
But that is necessarily independent of what is written in the law itself. If a group has enough power to overrule the written law then what you write in the law won't be able to stop them.
> Please clearly define the meaning of “you” in your simple law.
"no company shall have more than 30% market share in any market, any that does shall be broken into no fewer than twelve independent pieces."
It doesn't contain the word "you".
> Okay, I don’t own 50% of the market—my company does.
Then your company would be violating the law. "Company" means a set of entities that share a common ownership.
> what defines a “market”?
A set of products or services that serve as fungible substitutes for one another.
> What does “broken” mean here?
It means they no longer share common ownership. This is also what independent means.
> I agree with the spirit of your comment otherwise, but simple laws rapidly become complex laws because people are complicated and language is flawed.
But all of those things are just their ordinary meaning. Writing them down would make the law more explicit but it doesn't make it any more complicated. The definitions aren't each a separate set of criteria that have to be complied with separately, they're just a clarification to reduce possible ambiguity.
In particular, what you're doing is resolving edge cases. But the basic law has already addressed 99% of cases, because they're not ambiguous. An independent restaurant in a major city does not have >30% market share for food because there are many, many competitors. Microsoft has >30% market share for desktop operating systems because Microsoft has ~70% market share for desktop operating systems.
And we have to distinguish between two things here. One is, you see the word "company" and the dictionary says one of the meanings is a military unit, and then Microsoft claims that they aren't a company because they aren't a military unit. But if something has two meanings and one of them doesn't make sense in context, that's not the intended meaning. Using the "spirit of the law" for this kind of resolution is inherently necessary.
The other is, the law isn't ambiguous, but the unambiguous result is undesirable and the only way for a judge to fix it is to disregard the text and make something up. They shouldn't do this.
This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests.
"Letter of the law" often leads to harsh results when the law is drafted poorly, because if they wrote something dumb then you get something dumb instead of a judge rewriting the law to make people happy. But the people they're making happy are usually the powerful, so pick your poison.