> Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
Laws are written to be interpreted and applied by humans. They aren’t computer programs. They are full of ambiguity. Much of this is by design because there are too many possible edge cases to design a fully algorithmic unambiguous legal system.
True, but its not a free for all. Judges (especially in a common law juridsiction) are supposed to be consistent and interpret laws following certain principles. There are more right and less right interpretations - thus we can grade judges on how well they do their job.
I think the second paragraph is. They are saying that an "error" is any departure from legal principles, and the poster is saying that that is a bad definition of error.
It doesn’t say anything about legal principles or consistency and it mentions that “errors” may only be departures from a surface level understanding.
“ Such departures, however, may not always reflect true lawlessness. In particular, when the applicable doctrine is a standard, judges may be exercising the discretion the standard affords to reach a decision different from what a surface-level reading of the doctrine would suggest”
The thing is, Laws do not forsee in all cases, and language is not completely objective, so you cannot avoid judgement calls. One example is computer hacking, which in many jurisdictions is specified in very vague terms.
Another example is that in the Netherlands, there's a crime called "valsheid in geschriften" which exists to make it easy to prosecute fraud. It states that if you create a document with false information with the intent to use that document to deceive, you can get up to 5 years of jail time or some really big fine. Is lying on a paper insurance form to get a cheaper premium breaking this law? This doesn't seem clear cut to me.
Nah. Too often their "crimes" are actually basic freedoms that they just find it profitable to deny. So many laws are bought and paid for by corporations. There is no need to respect them or even recognize them as legitimate, let alone make them universal.
This view seems to miss the goal of the justice system in the first place. The goals are societal. Any consistency is a means and not an end.
(IE being consistent at all is simply one thing that helps achieve some of the societal goals. It is not a goal itself. A totally consistent system that did not achieve the societal goals would be pointless)
Equality of everyone under the law is an end, not a means. That's not completely synonymous with consistency, but it's not going to be achieved without a pretty high level of consistency.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.