Comment by iamnothere
4 hours ago
Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.
Legislators should force future would-be tyrants to flagrantly violate the law, as this is more likely to generate popular resistance.
4 hours ago
Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.
Legislators should force future would-be tyrants to flagrantly violate the law, as this is more likely to generate popular resistance.
> Laws that are so poorly worded that they could be easily misused are bad laws.
The point is that these laws aren't badly written. There's already protections in place for what's described above.
I don’t believe this is the case, every now and then we see prosecutors using an obsolete unenforced law or an unexpected edge case of some law to come after people.
A great example is the CFAA. It has been judicially narrowed after court battles, because in its original form it was overbroad and criminalized basic, common things. Prosecutors abused it in order to get political wins until they were finally stopped.
This is unfortunately fairly common. Legislators either push for too much or don’t understand how the law might be applied, and innocent people suffer until someone wins a big expensive set of appeals.
Edit: I realize now you may be talking about the UK in particular, in which case you don’t even get this shoddy level of protection as “Parliament is sovereign” (lol).
I'm talking about the specific law that was being discussed, and the particular other law I used as an example. And the protection mentioned was the one of double jeopardy which had also been explicitly mentioned.
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