> Lawmakers define law.  The courts interpret it - and sometimes interpret
> it to mean something other than what the lawmakers wrote it to mean.

Interestingly, I have some experience in this direction.

Under lab regulations, you have to have written procedures for certain 
things. Once you write such a procedure, it becomes a "law" as such. If 
you don't follow that procedure, hypothetically you could go to jail. 
[Although that's rather unlikely in practise.]

Before the procedure goes into effect, it has to go through a long 
convoluted bureaucratic collaboration and approval process. But once the 
procedure is "issued", it becomes law. Whatever the procedure says, 
that's what you have to do.

Usually this isn't a problem. The problems start when some unusual 
circumstance that the procedure writer hadn't considered occurs. Then 
you get people standing around scratching their heads and interpreting 
the hell out of the actual written text of the procedure.

You would think that in the event of an unusual circumstance, the 
scientists running the experiment would be expected to use their best 
judgement to determine the most scientifically sound course of action. 
You would be wrong. Instead, the scientists are required to blindly 
follow the procedure document, no matter how stupid that is. The 
impetus, then, is on the procedure writers to write procedures which 
take into account every possible unusual circumstance that could ever 
occur in the history of civilisation.

OTOH, nobody tries to subvert procedures "on purpose". I gather people 
actually do that with laws. ;-)

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