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Honest question, isn't the spirit of the law the same as the intent of the law?

Yes and sometimes it's subtly different from the letter of the law. The point is, if I understand it correctly, that in the US, courts always literally interpret the law as written, whereas in the EU there's a culture of sometimes, when the letter of the law super clearly differs from the intent it was obviously written with, siding with the intent of the law rather than the precise wording.

That doesn't jibe with my understanding. For one thing, "interpreting the law as written" is impossible on its face. You need to have an understanding of what it means, i.e. interpret it. And not only that, isn't the whole deal with Common Law that the judge, judges?

> in the US, courts always literally interpret the law as written

I think lots of courts claim this, and none actually do.

No. US courts consider both, to the extent that it’s a bright-line divider between “conservative” judges and “liberal” ones, where the former are far more likely to profess strict adherence to the text of the law (particularly constitutional law).

In any case, there is always a difference between the “intent” of a large and diverse body of politicians, and the actual text of a law. Any practical legal system must take it into consideration.

IIRC a common law maxim oft repeated said something like: “a judge doesn’t make a ruling because it is right, the ruling is right because the judge has ruled it.”

It’s the same problem as those reading the Scripture literally. You can’t. You are reading a translation, for starters. To come even close, you need a subtle understanding of semite languages, culture and Greek, depending on your denomination. You need some guidance when reading, whether that is the Holy Ghost, your pastor, or a decade or two of yeshiva school.

Is this a different meaning of "conservative" and "liberal" from the political sides, or is this reply blatantly partisan?

> where the former are far more likely to profess strict adherence to the text of the law (particularly constitutional law)

This is a fiction and just an excuse conservative justices use to make conservative rulings when they don't like a law.

They are perfectly fine to abandon the text of the law whenever it doesn't move forward a conservative agenda. The shining example of this is the voting rights act. Something never amended or repealed by congress but slowly dismantled by the court counter to both the intent and the text of the law.

And if you don't believe me, I suggest reading over the Shelby County v. Holder [1] decision because they put it in black and white.

> Nearly 50 years later, they are still in effect; indeed, they have been made more stringent, and are now scheduled to last until 2031. There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.

IE "We know the law says this, and it's still supposed to be in effect. But we don't like what it does so we are canceling it based on census data".

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/529/

I think he meant to say the spirit of the law is the law.

If you read GDPR in it's complete form [1], there are 173 paragraphs before the actual law begins at CHAPTER I, almost half way down the page. Those are the reasons why the law was created, what's it trying to achieve, how it is intended to work, responsibilities of govenrnments, etc.

The EU provided us the spirit of the law - in writing.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng

I’m not saying it’s true or false. Hypocrisy is universal to politics, and it’s trivial to find examples throughout US history on all sides of the political spectrum. I’m just saying that the issue of strict interpretation is so fundamental to the US legal system that it’s a core philosophical debate for judges.

> This is a fiction and just an excuse conservative justices use to make conservative rulings when they don't like a law.

Isn't this the other way around? If you cite "the spirit of the law" then you're ignoring the text in order to do whatever you want.

Finding a "conservative" judge who does the latter is evidence that the particular judge is hypocrite rather than any argument that ignoring what the law actually says is the right thing to do.

But you also picked kind of a bad example, because that wasn't a case about how to interpret the law, it was about whether the law was unconstitutional.

The problem here is that people need some way to know if doing something will incur a penalty before they actually do it.

One way to do that is to interpret the law strictly according to the text, or in the case of ambiguity to choose the interpretation that benefits the accused rather than the government. Then you could just read the law to know if it prohibits what you want to do, because unless it unambiguously does, then it doesn't. And then if the government doesn't like it once they see someone doing that, it's up to them to change the law.

Another is to give people a way to get clarification ahead of time. This is called advisory opinions and governments generally hate them because as soon as you allow it, the government is going to be absolutely swamped with requests for clarification because everybody wants to pre-clear everything they're going to do rather than take the risk of getting punished for doing something without clearing it. But in order for this to work, getting a clarification has to be cheap, because "pay a million dollars for an advisory opinion to avoid the risk of a million dollar fine" isn't a real solution to the problem of people getting punished when the law is unclear.

So the first one is actually better, the only "problem" with it is that you need the government to be paying attention and promptly rework the law when it isn't having the intended effect, otherwise you'll have people complaining about it because in the meantime there is a dumb law on the books. But if your government is bad at making good laws then you're going to have a bad time no matter what.

> Another is to give people a way to get clarification ahead of time. This is called advisory opinions and governments generally hate them because as soon as you allow it, the government is going to be absolutely swamped with requests for clarification because everybody wants to pre-clear everything they're going to do rather than take the risk of getting punished for doing something without clearing it. But in order for this to work, getting a clarification has to be cheap, because "pay a million dollars for an advisory opinion to avoid the risk of a million dollar fine" isn't a real solution to the problem of people getting punished when the law is unclear.

A partial solution to this problem is: write laws in a way that need a lot less clarification because there is rarely a need for it because the laws are thought out so well.

I too would like a free pony.

This is rather about free ensurance that the country won't use violence (the state authority) against you.

It's pretty obvious that they don't currently write laws that way, so the question is, what do you propose to change that would cause them to?

That's an uncharitable reading. Citing the "the spirit of the law" is not automatically ignoring the text in order to do whatever you want. It can be "how do I apply this archaic text about oxen (or whatever) to current events". Maybe the meaning is that stealing stuff in general is frowned upon, not just oxen. Or should we focus on how a Chevrolet Corvette is definitely not an ox?

A very first step could be to to brutally expose every politician who voted for such shittily designed laws.

Not doing that is a civic duty that I expect from every politician who wants to be considered to be more trustworthy than a child molester who has relapsed several times.