[Python-Dev] Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Hamish Lawson]

Aahz Maruch wrote:

> I don't know about contracts, but I've seen many proposed laws
> in the USA come with provisions that say (paraphrased),
> "Should any section of this law get struck down by a court,
> the remaining sections still stand."

However in a law there is not necessarily any dependency between
one section and another, while there is with a contract.

A contract essentially says that if conditions A and B and C are
satisfied then actions D, E and F must be carried out. The
question is what happens when satisfying one of the conditions
would require breaking the law. One argument is that this
condition should just be ignored; but we have learned that Roman
law took the position that, if some part of the contract could
not be satisfied without breaking the law, then the whole
contract was null and void.

However laws do not necessarily have any dependency between
their sections. For example, suppose the Wet Thursday Act is
passed, and it contains a section prohibiting the eating of
peanuts on wet Thursdays, and another section mandating the
wearing of a green hat in public on wet Thursdays. Nothing has
been said to make one of these sections dependent on the other;
that is, your obligation to wear a green hat on wet Thursdays
isn't expressly dependent on whether the law allows you to eat
peanuts. So if a court struck down the section on eating
peanuts, there is no logical reason why the section on wearing a
green hat couldn't remain. However if this section had instead
said that your hat must be decorated with the peanuts you would
normally have eaten on that day, then that would probably be a
different matter, since there now does seem to be a dependency
between the two sections.

This is the essential difference between a contract and a law.
The parts of a contract are expressly dependent on each other,
while in a law they need not be.

Hamish Lawson



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