Resolved: The Letter of the Law Ought to Have Priority Over the Spirit of the Law.

I will begin by rebutting your first argument. Within it, you state, "My first contention is that prioritizing the Letter of the Law over the Spirit of the Law ensures that all men are judged by the same standard. This is paramount to the resolution, because all laws first must be just, and if the law cannot be just if it applies to different people in different ways." I'd like to argue that after a certain (and probably short) amount of time, different cases that had been resolved would set a standard for future cases. This does happen with the Supreme Court in our system today. When the Supreme Court rules on a specific type of case, it generally sets the standard for all cases alike in the future. I believe that if our courts focused on the spirit of the law and ruled on different cases prioritizing the spirit, it would set standards for similar cases in the future. Therefore, the laws would have a set standard and any new cases that arose would continue to set standards. Your second argument is that prioritizing the letter of the law ensures the spirit is kept, if I am not mistaken. This argument makes little sense to me, so lets use the tax code as an example. The tax code is written very specific and the letter of it is surely prioritized. Multiple problems have arisen from it obviously. One would be the fact that its so excessive in length that very few people in the world could ever read it all and understand it completely. The main problem though is that by creating different ways the law applies to different situations creates, like I said before, loopholes where people and corporations can evade taxes. In all honesty, if I really didn't want to pay taxes right now, I could easily evade them because of the loopholes that have formed, and my evasion would be completely legal. However, when people can evade it so easily and many do, I would argue that the spirit of paying taxes (which is 100% just in my opinion) has been lost and it has just become another obstacle or burden that people see. I would argue that if it were written simpler, it would have little to no loopholes for corporations or normal people and we wouldn't have so much debate in society about it all the time. If we followed the spirit of the law, which is that everyone should contribute fairly to society to help upkeep it, I believe we would be able to stop these obvious tax evasions and at the same time, normal people would be able to understand the tax code. Third, you argue that by judging based on ethics, it infringes on peoples individual rights and such. However, I don't necessarily think that judging based on the spirit of the law is judging based on ethics. I would rather interpret it as judging based on what the law is intended to do, rather than what the law specifically says. A law doesn't necessarily have to be ethical, as ethics differ from person to person. Now I will help you understand by what I meant with the iPod example. The point was that in day to day life we don't need formal judges and law books and lawyers for everything, because we follow the spirit of the law and can generally judge for ourselves whether we're breaking it or not. Unfortunately this doesn't exactly help explain it and that's one of the disadvantages of debates over text I guess. Maybe that example was better suited for a vocal debate. One thing last thing I'd like to point out is that when a law is written in specifics and the letter of the law takes precedence, it is virtually impossible to cover any loopholes. This is why we have such complex laws. We try to patch them up continuously instead of looking at the way laws are written. This is why it is so important to value the spirit and intention of the law over the letter of it. It is the only way to make sure it is followed. Essentially, it's finding a balance between specifics and intention that will fix the law system we have today.