I used to think that anyone could read a law and known what was forbidden or required. Apparently I was sadly mistaken:

1) Last year the Supreme Court decided that a law didn't mean what it plainly said, implying that no law may means what it plainly says.

2) The legal view of the Constitution as a "living document", once you strip away all of the legal mumbo jumbo, means that if a judge doesn't like what the Constitution says, he decrees that it says something different.

I'd like to be a law abiding citizen, but if law is not decided until the courtroom, I have no idea what I should do to obey. To make matters worse, I may obey what a judge said the law is yesterday, and be decreed a lawbreaker by a different judge today.

Our system is broken.

Don't take everything so literally. Sheesh.

If society were simple, the law might be simple. But society is not simple, and it is not able to write law that will explicitly cover every circumstance imaginable. Hence it becomes the case that what is implied in the law is just as important as what is expressed in the law. It has always been this way and always will be.

Originally laws were written in Latin so only the learned could understand them. In the 1500s a character in Shakespeare's Henri IV urged the killing of the lawyers. The 19th century gave us the line "The law is an ass". Lawyers were arguing and judges were ruling that laws did not mean what they said before this country was even founded. Lawyers today won't guarantee their interpretation of the law is correct. If there was a time when you thought you could know what the law was, then you were either extremely gifted or extremely naïve.

In my experience those who rant against the idea of the Constitution as a living document, like those who rant against activist judges are seldom upset with the ideas in the abstract. Instead they object to the result the judge reaches.