> Probably not, since they would consume a lot of lawyer time at the relevant agencies. If it were free, people could file thousands of slightly different requests for all imaginable variations of their dubious business plan, hoping that something would slip by.
If they tell you that you can't do it, that should give you standing to challenge their determination in court. And, of course, if they tell you that you can do it, they can't later prosecute you for the thing they officially approved. Asking them a hundred times doesn't matter; if they say yes then you're happy and if they say no you can sue them and it becomes an issue for the courts in the same way as if they charged you for it, except that you don't go to jail if the courts rule against you because you haven't done it yet.
> There would maybe need to be a new profession of counterfactual judges who decide on the legality of things that haven’t happened.
We could call them lawyers and have them work for the agency in charge of prosecuting that part of the law, so when they publish their opinion it expresses the official position of the prosecutor's office and precludes them from reinterpreting the existing law in a different way against your behavior ex post facto.
> How much should such a process cost?
They're lawyers. They get paid by the hour. The first thing they do is evaluate how many hours it will take to research your question, the estimate is free, and then you decide if you want to pay them. In most cases this will not take much; these are professionals answering questions in the specific area of their expertise. How much time does it take to answer a simple yes or no question?
The answers all get published (no secret interpretations of the law) and can be used by anyone, so large entities will often pay to have an ambiguous law clarified and then everybody knows the answer.
The only thing you're doing here is requiring them to tell you how they intend to interpret the law. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
If they tell you that you can't do it, that should give you standing to challenge their determination in court. And, of course, if they tell you that you can do it, they can't later prosecute you for the thing they officially approved. Asking them a hundred times doesn't matter; if they say yes then you're happy and if they say no you can sue them and it becomes an issue for the courts in the same way as if they charged you for it, except that you don't go to jail if the courts rule against you because you haven't done it yet.
> There would maybe need to be a new profession of counterfactual judges who decide on the legality of things that haven’t happened.
We could call them lawyers and have them work for the agency in charge of prosecuting that part of the law, so when they publish their opinion it expresses the official position of the prosecutor's office and precludes them from reinterpreting the existing law in a different way against your behavior ex post facto.
> How much should such a process cost?
They're lawyers. They get paid by the hour. The first thing they do is evaluate how many hours it will take to research your question, the estimate is free, and then you decide if you want to pay them. In most cases this will not take much; these are professionals answering questions in the specific area of their expertise. How much time does it take to answer a simple yes or no question?
The answers all get published (no secret interpretations of the law) and can be used by anyone, so large entities will often pay to have an ambiguous law clarified and then everybody knows the answer.
The only thing you're doing here is requiring them to tell you how they intend to interpret the law. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.