Who cares if its complicated and complex?

>Lots of laws are up to interpretation which is why we have judges.

What you describe is retroactivity: i.e. in some systems (like Anglosaxon Common Law)- more than in others (like European Civil Law) there is some retroactive legislative power granted to judges, who normally only apply the law and not write or clarify it.

This is orthogonal to formalization. I wish to illustrate this by example, but I want to keep my comment as orthogonal as possible to other opinions, since I am not trying to force civil law views on people who prefer common law and vice versa I will describe possible ways of formalizing the comment you made for 3 systems: civil law, common law and direct democracy. It's just an idea, fit or don't fit it in your own ideology as you like.

General definitions:

- Green zone: actions which are explicitly permitted with ultimately very low probability of retroactive punishment or fine for a perpetrator.

- Red zone: actions which are explicitly forbidden with ultimately very low probability of retroactive non-enforcement of compensation to a victim of the action.

- Grey zone: actions which are explicitly guaranteed to be retroactively decided upon by the appropriate authority: in the Common Law: either legislative branch or a judge; in a pure Civil Law: the legislative branch; in a direct democracy: a vote or referendum by the people at large, aka trial by democracy (frowned upon, just like stepping in the grey zone).

- All cases are decided by a formal verifier, the victim (a company, the state, an individual, ...) presents the formal proof of the defendant's crime in the red zone. Normally the Defendant is unable to formally prove he is in the green zone (an inconsistency in the law). If he is able to present such a proof then the case is decided (and the law is either reformed to resolve this specific inconsistency or kept gray) by forwarding the case to the authority as described in the Grey zone definition. Virtually never should an inconsistency be found.

- If an entity is found to have acted provably in the grey zone, anyone can make claims, and they are again brought to the appropriate legislative authority (parliament, judge or public depending on your system of choice)

- A budget of say $1M per day for the US (which comes down to less than $2 per capita per year) goes continuously into a growing pot, and anyone is free to explore the machine readable law and construct hypothetical inconsistent situations. If you can find a hypothetical inconsistent situation before it actually occurs to people you spare people misery. The inconsistency that hopefully didn't occur yet is presented to the legislative authority, again parliament/judge/populace. At any rate, the rate at which inconsistencies are discovered tells us something about the quality of laws written, and which laws needs more attention than others. The reward is half the reward pot content, so if one a day is found its $1M, if 10 a day are found $100k if one every 10 days its $10M... This is what I meant with ultimately very low probability of retroactive decisions.

- Risk averse entities will stay in the green zone, audacious ones embrace the whims of the legislative branch, which is hopefully more expensive to bribe (with money or jobs) than a regulatory agency: this may be true for a parliament but perhaps less true for a single judge. Bribing the populace as a whole seems uneconomical and ... transparent.

- Since each sector has competition, and some actors will remain more in the green zone and other will sometimes risk the grey zone, whenever a gray zone event is tolerated, the green zone companies will complain because their competition got ahead with a gamble, and they will require less and/or smaller grey zones, while the company that was in the gray zone will demand bigger and more grey zones to scare away those that prefer the concept of finality. So basically each sector sees both forces that vote for finality and also forces that vote for retroactivity. Most will probably demand finality. Now grey zones can expand and contract, if 1) they keep expanding indefinitely at some point there is no law and we are judged entirely ad hoc by parliament/judges/populace, or 2) they settle on a specific extent and staying in the green or going in the grey is a personal choice or 3) society (industry and or population) starts demanding laws without or at least with smaller and smaller grey zones, and the process is encouraging formalization of all law.

So retroactivity can be formalized without neccessarily devolving in ad hoc decision making.

It's the same confusion as between determinism and formalization: an indeterministic finite state machine can still be formalized.

So yes I still think its incompetence or malice. (today you can't even prove that you are in a green or red zone, in the system I just described you can at least verify such proofs if you can generate them)