Patching the wrong bit of East Coast code

Posted Mar 21, 2014 22:38 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Patching the wrong bit of East Coast code by brugolsky
Parent article: US Supreme Court looks at patent trolling

It is so sad that we have to pin our hopes on tortured interpretations of vague terms, rather than having a well-meaning legislature revise and clarify the law itself.

But look at the vague terms here. It's nothing that a legislature could possibly clarify with more words, particularly when everyone who votes on it would see those words differently. Things like this can be clarified only with a set of concrete examples, and that's what court cases create. Judges write thousands of words disambiguating vague terms such as "in exceptional cases." You wouldn't want to see a committee (legislature) attempt that in the abstract.

I know in many instances, laws are simply poorly drafted - inexcusably ambiguous - and I struggle to understand the politics that stops the legislatures from simply fixing them. But this looks like the common case where the legislature is deliberately vague because it wants the judicial branch to flesh out the law based on real life examples.