Now, I know I'm not a Magistrate and have no real weight here—but isn't that sort of thing sometimes necessary when deciding if something is a violation?
Sometimes you need to take something that's a known violation and see if it's really analogous to the current situation, in which case the current situation is a violation.
You often need to think a little beyond the current case, in order to decide if you really want to make this call. Too narrow is as bad as too wide. But too narrow isn't a problem right now. Too wide is. And that "beyond the case" thinking should be the problem of the Magistrates. In a real court, a lawyer arguing wide away from the case at hand would be quickly stopped by the judge. It is the job of the judge to think about unintended consequences of his ruling, it is not the job of the lawyers to argue a dozen hypothetical cases.
And my experience is very clear that someone arguing for a case by bringing up a slightly different hypothetical one is usually trying to pull a fast one on you. The trick even has a name in rhetorics, but I'm too tired to remember and too lazy to look it up right now.
