Legally inscrutable

An interesting piece at the Christian Science Monitor looks at how laws really get passed and why sometimes judges have to "legislate from the bench" in order for a measure to have any meaning at all.

Often enough the final version suffers what Dean Acheson called "agreement by exhaustion." After all, legislators have a final luxury: They can leave it to the courts to decide what they really meant - indeed, what they really said.

Sometimes contradictory language is left in the final version, or it contains sections that lawmakers didn't even know about. All very pretty, and it puts the lie to those who claim that textual literalism is possible.

(via Rebecca's Pocket)