Is a floating house a vessel?

The point is that laws are not written with the aim of being hard to define and therefore making work for lawyers. Laws are basically impossible to write in a way that there is no grey area about their definition and operation. Every once in a while - often in a vanishingly small percentage of situations - a new situation comes up, or someone who is not pleased with the outcome of a law will decide that they want it interpreted in a way that pleases them. Of course some such people feel that their own definition is the only true one - that's human nature and not the fault of those who write the laws.

The history of boat-related things like class rules and racing rules show just how hard it is to write rules that non-lawyers cannot argue about endlessly, so it's not just lawyers who get tangled in definitions and interpretations.

I don't know about the situation in the US, but where I live the drafters of statutes are specialists. The idea that they would write a law so that they could make money out of interpreting it later, in a different career, is very far-fetched.

If you reckon that laws are written so that lawyers can earn money from arguing about them, why not prove your claim by simply writing an easy, watertight definition of houseboat that no one will ever be able to dispute?


BTW lots of very happy western countries do very well with a lot of government. Why wish unhappiness on the Germans, Swedes and other people who have every right to decide they want more government than some people from the USA?

 

No, no, I'm just wishing as much of that sort of unhappiness on American statists as can be mustered. No one else.

And again it's better, speaking nationally and locally of course, to work to eviscerate the already existing statutes that make it occasionally necessary to try to differentiate.