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In reply to the discussion: Could the DU posters who have declared ... [View all]Igel
(35,540 posts)She laughed.
"The law doesn't mean what it says. It means what a judge says it says."
It removes the very idea of judicial interpretation into the specialist's camp, and treats all legal wording as jargon and cant. While I think that this is an insane way to run a country, nonetheless many lawyers delight in coming up with the most twisted, self-serving interpretation of language, using the most arcane methods, to win their cases. In fact, they delight in hard cases because they often make bad, albeit self-serving and distorted, case law. It means a regular, educated adult cannot hope to actually read the law and have any certainty as to what's legal or illegal.
No court has actually ruled on what "emoluments" in the emoluments clause means.
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