Comment by phillipcarter
3 years ago
I think for something like this to be effective, you need the actual intent encoded correctly (so this use case wouldn’t have been solved), and lawmakers acting in good faith (i.e., not drafting legislation that’s intentionally vague such that it can cast a wide net and force people to use the courts to dispute things).
You don't need those voting for the bill to act in good faith if you have as part of the system of passing bills that the opposition gets to write the (adversarial part of the) test suite. Then either that forces any loopholes (or other undesirable effects) to be: updated as explicitly intended (with bad publicity and potential for reversion upon a change of government); or taken into account and the bill updated to reflect that, or left in the test case for case law to cite as intended.
Either way you really want intent to be encoded somehow.
Intent could be derived by parliament debates minutes.
Yeah, uhh, having seen some of the hearings in recent state legislatures regarding abortion, that’s some flawed thinking. Lawmakers are intentionally vague throughout the entire process sometimes.