Sandra Bland Was Murdered

[Igel]

8. Yes, laws are very often over-broad.

And when they're not, lawyers make them over-broad.

Laws should be narrowly tailored and the rules of construction such that they're forced to be narrowly tailored.

This has consequences, though. You look at a lot of the most favored SCOTUS or Federal court decisions and you'll find that the ones we often like the best are those that are as broadly construed as possible. If you like a living Constitution, then that attitude will filter down so that the laws are "living" and mean pretty much what anybody wants them to mean. If you like a Constitution that are words written at a specific time on paper with a procedure to have those words changed, then that's the kind of laws you're likely to produce.

A lot of most-favored executive actions are based on the same principle: laws were broadly written and liberally construed, so the kinds of authority that the executive has to decide to not enforce laws or to create what amounts to a new protected class weren't available, and had they been there'd have been hell to pay.

We love broadly written, broadly construed laws when they go our way. When they don't, we demand narrowly construed, narrowly written laws. What matters to us is that we decide the laws based on what suits us now--not others, and not last month or next month. And that's the first problem, having an entire society increasingly built on that principle.