"Rule of law" is the one where the letter of the law is a clear and unambiguous true statement of the intent of the legislature.
"Rule of lawyers" is what happens when it isn't and then you need a rhetorician to have an ex post facto political debate about "the spirit of the law" in a courtroom rather than in the statehouse where it belongs to begin with.
I feel like you're just setting me up for the line where in American court dramas the government is reasonable, the courts are just and the defendants are bad, so if it's different in Europe...
But seriously, if you're at the point of having to rely on "the spirit of the law" it's pretty much always because the letter of the law is poorly drafted. It doesn't really matter which continent you're on.
In Europe politicians are generally not lawyers unlike USA, so the legal system cannot work in the same way. "Spirit of the Law" is what a non lawyer would assume the law to mean, since most laws are drafted by non lawyers. Legal battles are usually cheaper in Europe than in USA so it seems to work as intended even if you think that it wouldn't work in theory.
> But seriously, if you're at the point of having to rely on "the spirit of the law" it's pretty much always because the letter of the law is poorly drafted.
There is a truth to that. We need to rely on the spirit of the law because lawmakers, like everyone else, are neither omniscient nor do they never make mistakes. Letting people use unintended loopholes makes sense if you treat the law as a game, not if you treat it as a mechanism to achieve justice.
It's not a question of infallibility. Legislators will make mistakes. They're human.
The question is, what do you do when you find one?
Option one is that you go back to the legislature and have them fix the law, which then applies to future conduct. Particularly for issues affecting ongoing operations on this scale, this is a completely reasonable option.
Option two is that you go to the court and ask them to remake the law and apply it retroactively to past conduct, then impose billions of dollars in fines for following the law as it was written.
But option one doesn't extract revenue from foreign companies. Which is why people are suspicious of your motives when you jump to option two.
Option one also has the advantage that it can produce more coherent results, because the legislature doesn't have to operate under the pretext that it isn't making a change to the law when it really is.
> But option one doesn't extract revenue from foreign companies. Which is why people are suspicious of your motives when you jump to option two.
I don't think we need to cater to paranoid Americans.
> Option one also has the advantage that it can produce more coherent results, because the legislature doesn't have to operate under the pretext that it isn't making a change to the law when it really is.
It's perfectly reasonable for a legislature to assume it isn't changing the law when the law isn't being changed and it's not the legislature that is acting.
> I don't think we need to cater to paranoid Americans.
A fine position if you don't care about businesses abandoning the European market and the US government using it to justify retaliation against EU companies in the US market.
> It's perfectly reasonable for a legislature to assume it isn't changing the law when the law isn't being changed and it's not the legislature that is acting.
If a court is interpreting the law to mean something other than what it says, it's changing the law.
> A fine position if you don't care about businesses abandoning the European market and the US government using it to justify retaliation against EU companies in the US market.
Oh well. We might become as isolated as China. Businesses don't care about rule of law when there is profit to be made. Also most people are capable of understanding how laws and courts work.
> If a court is interpreting the law to mean something other than what it says, it's changing the law.
If a court is making jokes and filming sketches, it's a comedy troupe.
