As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. . . . The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."
That's the basic issue. Legislators craft laws in a rather messy process[1] that involves trade-offs among interest groups,
with many laws having built in from the get-go a certain amount of illogic. Judges who rule on cases are supposed to interpret the law as written by the legislature and as it applies to the cases before them, and sometimes particulars of how a case was argued by its parties introduces further illogic into judicial decisions. The law will never be perfectly logical--at least, not until human beings in general are perfectly logical and willing to set aside their personal interests for the sake of greater logical consistency in the law.
[1] "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
That's the basic issue. Legislators craft laws in a rather messy process[1] that involves trade-offs among interest groups,
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html
with many laws having built in from the get-go a certain amount of illogic. Judges who rule on cases are supposed to interpret the law as written by the legislature and as it applies to the cases before them, and sometimes particulars of how a case was argued by its parties introduces further illogic into judicial decisions. The law will never be perfectly logical--at least, not until human beings in general are perfectly logical and willing to set aside their personal interests for the sake of greater logical consistency in the law.
[1] "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe