'I Have Been to the Darkest Corners of Government, and What They Fear Is Light'

[Vattel]

73. To be fair, you have to admit that you are moving the goal posts a bit

by saying that the "current interpretation is way the law is applied" and "for the practical purposes of the present, the current interpretation is the law." That's okay with me. So long as you don't confuse the law with the current interpretation of the law. Courts sometimes misinterpret the law (e.g., the FISA court butchered the business records section of the Patriot Act) and very often the principles that courts appeal to justify their decisions are too broad. That is understandable. The Court in Smith v Maryland could hardly have envisioned the sort of vast collection of phone metadata by the NSA when it was justifying its decision in a case of the police using a pen register to collect phone metadata from a single phone in the house of a suspected criminal.