Law is code

As the marriage debate rages, consider the fact that law is a code. Our legal code has a format: “marriage”. The format has a long history of application, we understand its use cases. Except now we have a new use case. A pragmatic hacker would not throw out the format, or otherwise rebrand it in response to vocal advocacy, even if the format had flaws. We have a format, and the format works. It’s imperfect, not everyone will be happy with extending it, but the alternative is overlapping and incompatible formats, which is much worse.