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Notes -
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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