Posted by hungryhobbit 6 hours ago
This level of parsing looks like judicial legislation to me. Isn't it one occurrence if the Rams win and another if the Packers win? Better that they declare the law void for vagueness and give the legislature another shot at it. Guessing what the words mean, when it is not at all clear to professionals let alone to the average citizen does not give proper notification of what the law is to the people subject to it.
The key is that up until a few years ago basically the universal consensus was that sports gambling was not possible on a CFTC regulated exchange, then all of a sudden Kalshi did it and now they are trying to pay enough lawyers to get them to justify it. This ruling is not judicial legislation, this is demanding that companies actually follow the law.
You could live in Germany or France if you prefer a legal system more ruled by clear statute?
The statute gives the general intent, but with an understanding that until the shit hits the fan in an actual court case, noone will have truly considered the detailed ramifications, so leave some intentional ambiguity there for the courts to resolve on real, actual, grounded cases rather than theorizing.
And if the legislature disagrees with a courts opinion about the ambiguity it left, it is very free to clarify in statute, which will override the court! (Unless the issue is constitutional, in which case the legislature is very free to draft a constitutional amendment!)
"Because the definitions of event and occurrence do not resolve the issue before us, we must also consider the statutory context"
They talk about this and the exact definitions for basically the entire opinion. It's not just "meh, I felt like it". They are dealing with how these words have been defined in prior statutes.