You may want to see if there's any legislative history. All these inquiries prove inconclusive. Yet you still have to decide the case. You may say to yourself that this goldfish isn't harming anyone, why should her presence cause such a commotion. On the other hand, you may also find yourself thinking that that isn't really your call to make.
Public figures condemn the court as a citadel of technicality.
The public shakes its head, and laments the demise of common sense in our court system. I hope this gives you some sense of the difficulty a judge can face when attempting to apply a simple, straightforward statute to real-life facts the Legislature may not have foreseen. Most often the public doesn't even know that the issue is controlled by a statute. To some pundits and commentators, only the result, only the bottom line, counts. Statutes frequently are amended.