Patent claims are also written broadly, deliberately by the lawyers. There's a whole part of every trial where "claim construction" takes place, and I personally helped with many of those briefs when in Google Legal.
The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs.
"Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today.
That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.
Not trying to be rude here, but I highly recommend you do a little more research on the common law system and how it works. At it's core, common law states that laws are interpreted over time and these interpretations become the official law of the land. There is no requirement that every conceivable form of infraction be enumerated within the law itself.
Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.
I don't know what your legal credentials are (are you a lawyer?). I had an article cited in an amicus brief to SCOTUS for the CLS Bank case, plus a shorter one in Law360. What have you published? Aside from that, I helped with numerous claim construction briefs.
I highly recommend you educate yourself about the distinction between common law and statutory law, since you seem confused:
> A clarification of the term "common law" is in order at this point. While
common law may have originally referred to a body of law thought to exist
in common across jurisdictions under generally accepted standards of legal
reasoning, I use the term here to distinguish statutory law made by
legislators from case law made by courts. It is well understood that each
state has its own common law, crafted by its courts under the supervision of
the state supreme court, subject only to the supremacy of federal statutory
and constitutional law.
Corporations' relationship to their contractors is most definitely not "common law." At most, it's administrative law, and if we come to questions of interpretation, it's statutory law.
I'm not talking about contracts. I'm talking about labor laws and there have been prior instances where interpretations of labor law, the intent of the law, and how contractors were treated trumped what was written in the contracts (e.g. permatemps).
I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. Contracts? What does that have to do with it and when did those come up?
Before, you were "not trying to be rude" about "common law," and I just demonstrated that common law has nothing to do with labor laws. Common law is judge-written law developed over centuries, as those references I gave you lay out.
Labor laws are statutory law, sometimes modified by administrative rulings. As I said at the start of this, laws are construed by judges, much like patent claims are. Whether Amazon's indirect contractors are "employees" or not comes down to judges' constructions of the relevant laws, which in turn is influenced by the briefs submitted by each side. That's why California has had voter initiatives to change the laws.
