Your understanding is correct, but where your understanding goes astray is thinking that that's a bug. The subjectivity is a feature. It is not possible to specify what should legally happen for all possible circumstances the entirety of humankind faces. Like, literally not possible. We humans can't even create rigorous specifications for what our programs should do that keep up with their evolving requirements, and you want to make life-ruining decisions set in stone based on a rigorous set of predetermined rules about all possible circumstances the entirety of humanity could face any time in the future in an evolving world?
Law is intentionally not code. The world is not something you can program.
Isn't achieving a rigorous, unique specificarion what civil law tries to achieve? Not that it is a success, but the idea behind it. Sorry if this is a silly question, but this is how I understand it.
No, it doesn't. It aims to provide a fairly comprehensive framework within which judgments can be made, but it is absolutely expected that there are edge cases and ambiguities which are resolved by human judgment of the circumstances.
Since this is a thread about using ChatGPT for law, I should note that this is actually one of the most important reasons you'd rather hire a lawyer than ChatGPT to represent you. A good lawyer or firm will know the local judges and how they tend to lean on ambiguities in their area of expertise, and will be able to use that information to both advise you and tailor their arguments to appeal to the judge's sensibilities. There is an element of unfairness to this, to be sure, but you'd find much more unfairness really quickly with machine-generated judgments because of how messy and non-compressable real world circumstances are.
I understand, thank you so much for the detailed answer.
Write me the code that says how the Lindsay Clancy case should have come out.
if murder: verdict = guilty
Now define murder!