When I went toe-to-toe with a debt collector, I quickly discovered that many laws are vaguely written by lawyers to encourage litigation.
The language in both the federal and state debt collection laws was so ambiguous that my research only lead me to consumer agencies saying I needed to ask an attorney. Or, I would find court cases where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove.
I stood my ground with the debt collector on refusing to pay interest on medical debt after paying off said debt, but they never admitted I was right, and I am still baffled by their arguments that only an attorney could navigate.
>...In the real world, people usually attempt to solve problems by forming hypotheses and then testing them against the facts as they know them. When the facts confirm the hypotheses, they are accepted as true, although subject to re-evaluation as new evidence is discovered. This is a successful method of reasoning about scientific and other empirical matters because the physical world has a definite, unique structure. It works because the laws of nature are consistent. In the real world, it is entirely appropriate to assume that once you have confirmed your hypothesis, all other hypotheses inconsistent with it are incorrect.
> In the legal world, however, this assumption does not hold. This is because unlike the laws of nature, political laws are not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion.
The law is not a set of propositions, so this issue does not arise. The law is a linguistic artefact which requires interpretation to derive propositions, ie., pragmatics. The pragmatic context of interpretation, hemmed-in by precedent, dramatically narrows the range of admissible "legal propositions" in any given legal context.
The idea that the law is, or should be, a canonical set of propositions is the real "myth" here, one espoused by people who haven't thought for a moment how such a set of propositions could ever be constructed.
> where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove.
It does not matter what the law says, you always have to litigate if you want to force another party to do what you want. If the law says it and they don't do it, you have to. If case law confirms it and they don't do it, you also have to. Commonly referred to as the 90% of the law: they have what's yours, but it's up to you to put in the effort to prove it and get anything back at all
Judges never alter law made by the legislator, in any (trias politica) legal system that I know of (Netherlands mainly, but also what I read of UK law and friends), but in all of the aforementioned: the case law is an important aspect of your obligations and rights. One refers to it as basically equal to law, but it doesn't alter the law itself
Judges at least in the USA can alter the law, in two ways:
1. They can determine the law does not apply
2. They can decide the law collides with another, higher ranking law and so does not apply
Both don't really do anything unless the other judges start to agree with them, in which case people stop bringing the cases because they know they'll lose.
The cost of fighting the case is almost always way more than the value of the case, so they'll avoid fighting it if the outcome is pretty well determined. This is one case where you have an advantage; you can defend yourself pro se (and likely lose) but the very cost of attacking your pro se defense is often way more than the value they get from you.
The language in both the federal and state debt collection laws was so ambiguous that my research only lead me to consumer agencies saying I needed to ask an attorney. Or, I would find court cases where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove.
I stood my ground with the debt collector on refusing to pay interest on medical debt after paying off said debt, but they never admitted I was right, and I am still baffled by their arguments that only an attorney could navigate.