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This is another one where I thought Aguinaga knocked it out of the park:
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When I explain these sorts of cases to my wife, she asks why I'm not interested in doing law, and every time, I wind up answering that this is exactly why I don't want to! You can have a case that just seems obviously, incontrovertibly correct, but if you've got a justice that already decided what they'd like to do, it's not very hard for them to use brilliant legal reasoning to do what they want to do.
Not a lawyer, but I think this is much less of an issue in the day-to-day practice of law than when one's arguing novel and politically charged issues in front of the Supreme Court, or even in the kinds of court cases that you hear about in the news.
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I came to the same conclusion a long time ago. Think of cases where an employee for a company was doing something stupid in violation of all OHSA, safety protocols, policy and direct orders from their manager. The employee now has a disability/requires ongoing expensive medical care. A judge will often twist the law into a pretzel to justify giving the employee money because the employee needs money to live and the company is involved and has money. Simple as that. Legalese is just the obfuscating ink cloud to provide some plausible deniability for the erroneous judgment.
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Probably the most frustrating aspect of legal practice when you're autistically determined to reach the 'right' conclusion as a matter of law.
You can come armed to the teeth with precedent, facts, and legal argumentation and if you run into a Judge who is dead set on ruling a certain way you can 'lose' when they either rely on some particularly ambiguous precedent or some esoteric dissent or some novel legal concept they pulled straight from thin air (or read in a creative law review journal).
The Spirit of Aloha, for example.
Hence why I prefer when the Supreme Court sets out rules that at least sort of tie the law to something tangible and mostly immovable, rather than trying to weave increasingly intricate webs of reasoning to maintain an increasingly farcical standard which keeps collapsing when it comes into contact with the real world.
To be fair to Hawaii's Supreme Court, the spirit of aloha is a state legal standard established by statute in 1986. To be fair to anyone reading, normally statutes don't override constitutions, and this is definitely an example of a statute so hilariously vague that it's given judges a blank check to decide whatever they want.
Yep, quite fair.
I'm not even mad that they cite it, rather that the promulgate the idea that it can override constitutional rights and effectively grant the government extra authority if it argues for it artfully enough.
I'd be okay, on the other hand, referring to the "The Spirit of the Revolution" embodied by the Declaration of Independence as a justification for ignoring government restrictions in most cases.
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