I've heard this repeated a couple times here on HN. Do you have any citations for laws being vague on purpose? The whole point of laws, and the formal structure they take, is to reduce vagueness. Is this rock on person A's land or person B's land? When it turns out, despite best efforts, that a law is vague we even have a second system to step in and reduce the vagueness further: case law. I have no doubt that people are trying to exploit vagueness on both sides, but naysaying here is nonsense. And almost nobody wants law to be vague either.

Lawyer here (but I don't make any money from it and absolutely have no dog in this fight). I agree. Law is vague for two reasons - first it is often as a compromise between two positions that people were okay having decided on a case by case basis instead of fighting to the death over what to write down. It also is vague sometimes to intentionally capture the spirit of what it is trying to do. While I won't claim vagueness is never left to benefit someone ( I'm sure it happens), I would claim it is rare.

Law is basically a representation of societal judgement. While criminal law is intended to be clear enough to know when you've violated it, that is not the same as beimg logical or consistent. Civil law is even less logical and consistent. Formalizing it into logic generally does not make sense overall - it isn't really broken in most cases because it was never intended to be totally consistent. There are certainly areas that could use cleaner rewriting but courts are generally well equipped to figure out what it means. Congress and the states can always overturn interpretations of law, but the rate at which they rewrite laws because they thought courts interpreted it wrong is very, very low.

He’s half correct.

They are intentional.

They aren’t loopholes. They are just laws.

Some people just call them loopholes because they dont like them.

Much of the US Constitution is vague or "general."

There are quotes from at least Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson that support the idea that this was intentional.

I do agree with the main point though: laws shouldn't be vague and also case law tends to refine the meaning.

All overly broad generalizations are vague on purpose