What is more important: The letter, or the spirit of the law?

The letter of the law is the only way to make a final decision as to compliance or non-compliance with a law.

But the spirit of a law ought to be the guide to the prosecution or application of a law. And, it ought to be followed in determining the consequences of not complying with a law.

It must be the letter. @zenvelo states it admirably, though the difficulty with both the letter and the spirit of the law comes with their interpretation. The thumb in the eye examples for me are the rulings that corporations have the same rights as people. It’s that little stretch that sets us up for the next nail in the coffin for democracy, the gospel that money is speech – Citizens United. When it comes to the “spirit” of the law, those 2 rulings amount to the sanctioning of the idea that the government is AND SHOULD BE for sale.

Well…” Stay off the grass” does not mean if someone keels over from a heart attack on said grass you let them flop around and die so as to not violate the stay off the grass law. In this case it would be the spirit of the law that takes precedence. Yes, I too agree with @zenvelo Most laws, like most rules, have their exceptions and this is where the spirit of law vs. the letter of the law comes into play.

Seems to me that a good law would explain the spirit, and the purpose and rationale, so that an adjudicator (or police) can judge when and when not to apply it.

And when laws don’t explain those things, problems can and will happen.

I tend to think that unreasonable laws shouldn’t be laws, and shouldn’t be enforced. This is also often (but not often enough) practiced, where problematic and/or outdated laws are not enforced or are thrown out in court, or are enforced only when/if they makes sense and/or their spirit is followed.

But I also think that it is the obligation of legislators to write laws that explicitly cover the situations they want covered. So corrections for spirit should usually be in the favor of the defendant. i.e. sloppily written laws should lead to less enforcement than intended, but not more.

If you make a law but tinker with it depending on who broke it or how they broke it, then the law cannot be trusted because it doesn’t stand or is applied to everyone equally, how just could that be? That is why law today is so janky because one DA wants to apply the letter of the law to some and the spirit of the law to others. The spirit of the law might seem to make some logical sense in some matters, but if you don’t have that provision in the letter of the law, the law is gutted as to having any real power and left to how men want to apply it and thus becomes trustless, and arbitrary.

HC that’s where case law enters in.

@Coloma Get the F off my lawn

^^ HC that’s where case law enters in.
If the case law was predicated on a misuse of the spirit of the law, then every law in cookie cutter fashion will be flawed as a muffin tin with a dent in it.

The letter. Of course the spirit matters but usually only wins with some good lawyering and a gullible jury.

HC that’s why there’s an appeals process and a hierarchy of courts.

Not that it doesn’t suck when such things happen until someone invests the massive time and energy to do something about it. And that massively sucks. Just saying.

How does one decide what the spirit of the law is? There are those who say that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intentions of its original framers. It is helpful to know what those intentions were, but times change. The interpretation of the law may to change as well.

Well the idea is to employ the best humans we have to figure out what’s best within certain roles. Sadly, in practice, even for judges we see politics and worse, corporate-corrupted politics, driving way too much of what becomes law. Hello “Citizens United”. In that case, I’d say the law is morally bankrupt and should be removed by whatever means necessary, and the corporations and the politicians responsible should also be removed.