Reflecting on this a bit later, I realised that there's another reason (apart from the moral argument) that I find the Oregon solution adequate but non-ideal: indirectness is confusing, especially to the layman.
Arguably, this is just one redefinition, but it's a redefinition that effects a global search-and-replace without actually performing the global search-and-replace. It's fairly simple to hold just one of these in mind. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Oregon does something similar with another class of persons or relationships -- illegal immigrants, some novel form of privileged communication, embryos, clones, AIs, whatever. (It's my hypothetical, I can project a few decades into the future if I feel like it.)
The more substitutions a reader of the law has to hold in mind while reading the law, the more difficult interpreting that law becomes. While I hold great respect and appreciation for the breadth and depth of knowledge that lawyers master in the process of becoming lawyers, I find it regrettable that the law is not more readily accessible to non-lawyers, and in my worldview anything which carries an obscuring effect is Considered Harmful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful).
In essence, the argument from elegance holds that when faced with the choice between broadening the definition of a class (since these definitions are typically made in just one place) and broadening the effect of a number of statutes by unilaterally adding a class to the set of classes to which those statutes apply, it is preferable to broaden the definition of the class.
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Date: 2008-11-14 11:12 am (UTC)Arguably, this is just one redefinition, but it's a redefinition that effects a global search-and-replace without actually performing the global search-and-replace. It's fairly simple to hold just one of these in mind. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Oregon does something similar with another class of persons or relationships -- illegal immigrants, some novel form of privileged communication, embryos, clones, AIs, whatever. (It's my hypothetical, I can project a few decades into the future if I feel like it.)
The more substitutions a reader of the law has to hold in mind while reading the law, the more difficult interpreting that law becomes. While I hold great respect and appreciation for the breadth and depth of knowledge that lawyers master in the process of becoming lawyers, I find it regrettable that the law is not more readily accessible to non-lawyers, and in my worldview anything which carries an obscuring effect is Considered Harmful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful).
In essence, the argument from elegance holds that when faced with the choice between broadening the definition of a class (since these definitions are typically made in just one place) and broadening the effect of a number of statutes by unilaterally adding a class to the set of classes to which those statutes apply, it is preferable to broaden the definition of the class.