I always found the language in RFCs better than legalese. Just the fact that they specify up front what the words must, shall, required, etc mean makes it less ambiguous. I feel lawyers use the ambiguity of language to bend the law in the way they need at the moment.
Exactly. If the precision of the language of law was working we wouldn't need to fight over it in court. Our new tax code hadn't been read by anyone who passed it- and, as an accountant explained to me long ago- we won't know exactly what it means until we get to court.
Even if a reset is unsustainably simple, it's time for one.
Even if the law worked mechanically, we still need to argue it in court, since the law cannot encode the complexity of the real world anyway. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to break laws, so long as they have sufficient justification for doing so.
For instance, you won't be guilty of violating a law if you are coerced to do so, and the court still needs to evaluate what level of coercion you underwent, and that fundamentally requires human empathy.
The law is not meant to be employed mechanically. It's there to make society more efficient when handling the easy cases.
