Are laws written logically and rigorously? Are laws written logically and rigorously in law books? For example, do texts of laws specifically use &quot;if and only if&quot; instead of the more frequently used but less logically correct &quot;if&quot;? I am just giving a specific example, but there could be other subtle logical things that laws do not explicitly state. Also, bonus question, has any case in a court of law hinged on a point of logic?
Are laws written logically and rigorously? No. Laws are not consistently written to any consistent stylistic standards. Whatever legislators approve becomes the law even if the law is poorly drafted. While some legislative bodies, such as the Joint Tax Committee of the U.S. Congress and the legislative services department of many state legislatures encourage good, or at least consistent, drafting practices, these standards are routinely ignored in the course of the legislative process. This is particularly true in the United States, since it does not have a &quot;House of Revision&quot; akin to the House of Lords or the Canadian Senate, that is concerned primarily with the quality of legislative drafting, and also does not have law that are drafted by the secure majority of a Prime Minster in most parliamentary systems. Instead, in the U.S. there is constant haggling and negotiation on a bill by bill basis at every step of the legislative process right up through a conference committee reconciling different versions of a bill that arise between two houses of a bicameral legislature. As a result, the key drafting priority is to secure support of a majority of legislators in two houses of the bicameral legislature and then avoiding a veto of the final product, and that objective is pre-eminent over the objective of good drafting. Frequently, in the U.S., legislation is intentionally drafted ambiguously in order to secure its passage with different legislators essentially making &quot;bets&quot; on the courts interpreting the language which is known to be ambiguous in the manner that they prefer. Sometimes legal language that is very precise and logical is interpreted to mean something completely different than what it literally says. For example, consider the 11th Amendment to the United States which says: The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State. This is an amendment to Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 1 of the United States Constitution, which says: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State,—between Citizens of different States,—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. But, what the 11th Amendment actually means is that states retain sovereign immunity in most cases. The governing principle in interpreting legislation is not logic but legislative intent. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. summed up the situation famously when he said: The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
The holding of the Miranda decision says: (d) In the absence of other effective measures, the following procedures to safeguard the Fifth Amendment privilege must be observed: the person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him The body of the opinion also says The warning of the right to remain silent must be accompanied by the explanation that anything said can and will be used against the individual in court. although also He must be warned prior to any questioning that he has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in a court of law When SCOTUS says do this, that is the law. Since SCOTUS say can, will, and can and will, the only safe course of action is to say can and will. This page has some interesting discussion about the problem of the meaning of modals in a legal context. The Miranda warning does not constitute a contractual promise between the arresting officer and the arrestee, so "will" cannot be construed as a binding promise to prosecute and use the evidence in court. "Will" can only be construed as a prediction, as do "may" and "might". If the warning said "can, and mightmay be used against you", that choice or wording would suggest that the probability of statements being used against you is low – that would be totally misleading. The strongest modal should be used, because the probability is high that some statement will indeed be used against the person. Simply saying "can" suggests that it's a mere possibility, as opposed to a probability. "Can and will" is thus the appropriate construction for conveying the probability that your confession will be used against you. "Shall" shall not be used (it is confusing since it doesn't mean what the legal profession sometimes thinks it means); "must" is just plain wrong (it's legally meaningless to say "anything you say must be used against you", when many things that a person says would be inadmissible).
You'd have to specify the cases you want. All court transcripts are a matter of public record, though a copy may cost you a fee from the court clerk's office to recieve. It should be pointed out that not all cases got to an evidentiary stage to actually evaluate on the record any evidence. A vast majority were decided on pre-evidentiary rules such as standing or laches (timeliness) and not all cases that were able induced evidence debunked the evidence. Any appellent case would also not induce evidence as all appeals cases are strictly matter of law rather than matter of fact (evidence), so those cases would be asking a higher court to double check non-evidentiary decisions. The fact that the party that brought the suit does not have standing to bring the suit OR that the party that brought the suit brought it too late for the courts to proceed on the matter does not debunk evidence that the fraud happened in the eyes of the law... it simply means the questions of fact were never addressed at all
The main rules in a civil case are the rules of evidence, the rules of civil procedure, and a set of largely unwritten rules governing issues such as the order in which matters are presented in a trial and courtroom conduct. Basically, the rules of evidence are really a subset of a larger set of written and unwritten rules about courtroom conduct the unwritten parts of which are assumed to be known by people using them. Robert's Rules of Order do not apply to courtroom proceedings. The judge also has the "direct contempt" power to summarily punish disrespectful conduct in the courtroom without a trial, with fines or incarceration, even if it wouldn't be a crime outside the courtroom. But what if a party to the proceedings who does not "have the floor" wishes to do things like the following: Obtain a restatement (perhaps because it was unintelligible, or perhaps as a ploy for emphasis) of something uttered by another. If you are a party asking a question (or more likely an attorney for a party asking a question on behalf of a party) it is not improper to say, "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you." It is also not generally improper for a non-questioning party to interject and state that they can't hear a witness to a judge. Obtain clarification of a statement. This can be done by a party only when it is the party's turn to cross-examine or redirect as the case may be. A judge can ask for clarification, but a party cannot do so when it is not their turn. Determine or clarify the purpose of an ongoing statement or line of questioning Generally the party not asking a question objects and the court asks the party asking the question to clarify the reason. Sometimes, in a jury trial, the party asked to clarify will say "may we approach the bench" and a private discussion will be held between counsel for both sides and the judge regarding an ongoing issue. Determine whether the judge will allow something later in the proceedings. (E.g., "At some point I hope to speak to point X. May I do that now? Or will I be afforded that opportunity at some later point before the conclusion of this hearing?") Lawyers are expected to know this for the most part without having to ask. Also, usually before the court starts to take evidence, and at breaks, the judge will ask "are there any preliminary matters that need to be addressed?" or "are there any procedural matters that need to be addressed?" and questions such as this can be raised at that time.
In brief: In common law systems, are there specific laws? Yes. Are they written down? Yes, here are the laws of Australia and New Zealand. Or are there only previous court rulings? No. Elaboration: Broadly (and rather vaguely) speaking there are 3 sources of law in a common law jurisdiction: Statute law which consists of the Acts passed by the legislature Administrative law which consists of the rules and regulations made by the administrative arm of government under the powers granted them by the constitution or delegated by the legislature Case law which consists of the decisions made by the courts; this can be decisions based on Long-standing precedents whose origins are lost in the mists of time Interpretations of statute and administrative law It is important to remember that the courts only get involved to resolve conflicts (civil or criminal) - they do not unilaterally make decisions on the law. Judges (if they are wise) never give opinions on the law - that is the role of solicitors and barristers who are the paid advocates of the parties. The role of a judge is to decide how the law fits the circumstances of the particular case before them. To do this they interpret the statutes, administrative rules and decisions made by other judges on similar cases. The decision of a superior court is binding on a subordinate court, persuasive on an equivalent court or a court in a parallel jurisdiction and subject to review by a superior court. The overwhelming majority of cases do not make new case law - most of the arguments in court are about why (or why not) the established law applies to the current facts; they are not about what the law is. Occasionally a decision will be made that modifies the previous interpretation or even more rarely represents a paradigm shift - those are the cases that matter!
No. Jurors generally do not receive such an instruction and it is not a rule of law or evidence. Jurors have to rule in accordance with the law, but how they judge the credibility of witnesses may be influenced by emotional factors. How the witness says something is as much a part of the evidence as what they say.
In the vast majority of countries (both common law and civil law), statutes are interpreted in a manner that reflects the intend of the drafters of the statute a.k.a. legislative intent, when it is possible to reasonably determine what was intended. There is a canon of statutory interpretation in almost all legal systems that provides that absurd or nonsensical interpretations of legislative language are to be disregarded in favor of those that reflect the likely intent of the body passing the law, even if the literal and technical reading of the words does not state precisely what was intended. Thus, if there is a clear grammatical, punctuation, or spelling error and the intend meaning can be discerned from the language of the law, the larger context of the law, or extrinsic evidence such a legislative history and public discussion of the reasons for enacting the law in the first place, those clues will be used to interpret the legal effect of a law. Could this mean legal consequences or would I be safe as I &quot;bought nothing illegal&quot;? No. Ignorance of the law is no excuse even in cases where the interpretation of the law calls for the courts to ignore minor errors in legislative drafting. You would have an argument, but where you can state &quot;in fact 'Scolopendra gigantica' does not exist and they most likely meant 'Scolopendra gigantea'.&quot; The likelihood that you will face legal consequences is great. Also, in this particular example, keep in mind that biological species sometimes have more than one accepted Latin name, or once had a different name than the currently accepted name. For example, in this case, &quot;gigantica&quot; and &quot;gigantea&quot; are different grammatical inflections of the same Latin root word, and really are the same word in the same way that &quot;geese&quot; and &quot;goose&quot; are different tenses of the same word in English that refer to the same genus of birds. If a scientist discovers a new type of centipede and names it 'Scolopendra gigantica', would it be illegal immediately? The judges would look at all of the facts and circumstances and decide if the new species was within the scope of what the law intended to ban. But, the mere fact that the word is the same would not make the law apply to it. In the same way, suppose that a law had an exemption and didn't apply to animals in the town of Zootopia where many exotic pets are naturally common in the wild because a failed zoo released them into the area. But, given that context, the town of Euclid could not make itself exempt from the law by renaming itself Zootopia after the former town of Zootopia was disincorporated after its residents were all eaten by lions. If it was illegal to own a 'Scolopendra gigantea' due to that law and a scientist now names a new centipede 'Scolopendra gigantica' would that immediately legalize the 'Scolopendra gigantea'? No. For the same reasons discussed above. Footnote Re Similar Issues With Controlled Substances Laws This said, the issue you discuss does come up, and sometimes wins and sometimes loses, in the case of laws regulating controlled substances (i.e. illegal drugs). One of the reasons that this comes up is that the proper names of chemical substances in organic chemistry is not, as it is in biology, arbitrary. The name of an organic chemical is determined from looking at which atomic elements in which combinations with what kinds of bonds to each other are present. Given a chemical diagram of an organic chemical, every organic chemist would give it the same name, even if they've never discussed it, and likewise, you could ban an organic chemical that has never been observed or synthesized in real life and it would be illegal if it ever was synthesized. These statutes have usually been interpreted strictly to apply only to the named chemicals, but usually include an additional statutory section that either ban &quot;analog&quot; chemicals that are intended to or do have the same biochemical effect as the banned chemical, or allow an administrative agency to add new chemicals to the list without legislative action. Still, complications do come up even then because many lawyers and legislators become lawyers or politicians because they couldn't become doctors or engineers, because they flunked organic chemistry. (Joking aside, almost 50% of college students in the United States taking organic chemistry for the first time fail the course. This and first semester calculus are the most frequently failed college courses in the United States.) The Florida Cheese Ban For example, Florida recently classified a chemical present in many kinds of ordinary cheese as a controlled substance, which would in theory make every grocery store owner and millions of Floridians felons. Florida probably meant to ban high concentration synthetic extracts of that chemical administered as a drug, but didn't do anything to say so. But interpreting the statute to have that meaning was harder in that case since the same statute applies to many, many different drugs and the interpretation of the statute would make the ban on the chemical found in cheese make sense, would not make sense for the other drugs on the list. But, Florida courts may ultimately end up ignoring the addition of that chemical to the list based upon the canon against absurd interpretations, at least on an &quot;as applied&quot; case by case basis where the literal meaning of the statute would make millions of Floridian felons for violating this law. The Grand Junction Conviction For Possession Of A Legal Drug Another case came up in Grand Junction, Colorado where a woman was prosecuted by a government lawyer for possession of a controlled substance for possession of a chemical named in the indictment, and her government provided public defender had his client plead guilty to the crime. The woman tried to explain that this made no sense since its was an ordinary prescription drug, but the prosecutor, her own lawyer and the judge didn't believe her, and her public defender told her she was certain to be convicted anyway. (It isn't clear if she actually had a prescription for the drug, but even if she didn't, it wouldn't have been a crime.) So, she took a plea deal and was sent to prison to serve a medium length incarceration with work release sentence, instead of the medium length prison sentence she could have received if she went to trial, was convicted, and received a typical sentence for that conviction. The problem was that the chemical she was indicted for possessing in violation of the controlled substances act wasn't actually on the controlled substances list and wasn't an analog version of a controlled substance. There was also no reason to think that the drug he was convicted of possessing which had no pleasurable psychoactive effect was ever intended by the legislature to be banned or regulated. About a year later, in the year 2005, when this issue was ultimately discovered, a different criminal defense lawyer brought a post-conviction challenge to the conviction on the convicted woman's behalf, and the convicted woman was released with the conviction vacated, because the crime she was indicted for committing and convicted of didn't exist. Allysan Isaac, 24, was held nearly a year in work release for something that a judge said Tuesday was not even illegal. &quot;You were incarcerated for a case that was not a crime,&quot; said Mesa County District Judge Brian Flynn, who presided over the case. Flynn, the prosecutor and Isaac's defense attorney were unaware last year that the offense she was charged with was not a violation of the law. No one had noticed that a prescription drug found in Isaac's possession, an anti-anxiety medication called Buspirone, is not a controlled substance. ... District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said he had &quot;no idea&quot; why Isaac had been charged with and convicted of something that wasn't a crime. The defense attorney who represented Isaac in the first case was also baffled. &quot;I don't have an answer,&quot; assistant public defender John Burkey said. &quot;Nobody caught it. The police were saying it was a controlled substance.&quot; (Source quoting from and citing an article I read and confirmed the story from in the Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct newspaper. Corroborated here.) Incidentally, even though this woman was horribly wronged because of this wrongful conviction, the prosecutor and judge had absolute immunity from civil liability for the wrongful conviction, and criminal liability requires knowledge that you are committing a crime. The government likewise had no duty to compensate her for her wrongful incarceration because her rights weren't intentionally violated by anyone as required by civil rights statutes. She may have had a claim for legal malpractice against her own lawyer, for which negligence can be a basis of liability. Even that would have been a difficult case to win, however. This is because she would have to show that the public defender violated the standard of care of a reasonable lawyer by relying upon law enforcement's claim that a substance was a chemical banned by the controlled substances act which is a question of fact upon which expert witnesses could reasonably disagree. There is nothing in the public record to show that she pursued such a claim, but a private settlement reached before the case was filed wouldn't be revealed in that way. So, it is possible that a private settlement was reached in a legal malpractice case against her public defender that never actually resulted in a case being filed in court.
Yes though usually adverbs are not subject to statutory definition, so case law resolves most interpretive questions. But, 18 USC 1515: (b) As used in section 1505, the term “corruptly” means acting with an improper purpose, personally or by influencing another, including making a false or misleading statement, or withholding, concealing, altering, or destroying a document or other information. The Model Penal Code defines a number of adverbs: this is applied in Kentucky.