I imagine the judge would care; intent matters in the law.

Not anymore. Deposit a few checks into your bank account that are just under $10k, and you've committed a felony for structuring your deposits. It should be "intent," but that's too hard to prove.

There are indeed some (bad) laws for which that's true, but it's still fair to say that in law intent generally matters.

I don't think that's fair. It's accurate to say that the US Law is moving away from considering intent at all.

I got my example from popehat and there is a nice long blog post on there about how the laws are greatly moving away from "intent" and it is a dangerous thing.

For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

Apparently it's also called "smurfing".