IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2021 - 5

Editorial
Knowing the Unknowable: Soft Laws
and Hard Decisions
Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
 The 2021 NaTioNs League Cup FiNaL
was a soccer/football match played between France
and Spain. It was settled by a goal scored by a player
who was in an offside position when a ball was
passed toward him by his teammate, but was not
penalized because in its trajectory, the ball scraped
the studs of an opponent trying to intercept the ball.
According to FIFA's laws of the game " A player in an
offside position receiving the ball from an opponent
who deliberately plays the ball, ... is not considered
to have gained an advantage " [1, p. 100] and therefore
has not caused an offside offense. The goal was
allowed to stand, and France duly won the match,
and the cup, with this the winning goal.
This was the cause of some controversy.
It certainly seems bizarre. If his opponent had
not touched the ball at all, or if it had been accidentally
deflected by his opponent, then the goal-scorer
would have been considered to have been in an
offside position and would have been penalized for
an offside offense. But because the opposing player
tried, and failed, to intercept a ball being passed to
the player in an offside position (which of course
he did not, and could not, know), and in doing so
got the merest touch on the ball and this touch was
deemed deliberate, it was enough for Schrödinger's
footballer to flip between causing, and not causing,
an offside offense.
Talk about entrapment.
There was some commentary after the match
about the decision being technically correct according
to a literal interpretation of the laws of the game,
but not being in " the spirit of the game. " It is easy
to imagine that this situation was not of the type
that the regulators had in mind when they drafted
the rules, and added the caveat quoted above. But,
if this is the value that is being promoted, that is, if
the decisions that are produced are judged in consistent
with the " spirit of the game " (since no one
has any idea what a game spirit looks like or knows
what incantation will invoke one to whisper in the
referee's ear or act as a witness in the Court of Arbitration
in Sport), then the questions become: 1)
what is wrong with the laws as they are currently formulated;
2) how perhaps could they be alternately
formulated; and 3) under this alternate formulation,
what procedure could be used to produce a consistent
judgment. And finally, what are the implications
for this treatment of " soft laws " in sports arbitration
in other domains, for example, in criminal law or
deliberative assemblies.
In considering this first question, there are three
initial observations. The first is that the laws themselves
have not quite gone " The Full Nomic " [2],
in the sense that the rules do not specify their own
amendment and degenerate into paradox, but they
have become increasingly complex and generally
resistant
to traditional
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3125311
Date of current version: 7 December 2021.
December 2021
restaurant-tabletop explanations
with salt-cellars and pepper-pots. With that
complexity, there is a scope for something on the
spectrum between ambiguity and inconsistency: in
the situation described above, a moderate lawyer
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5
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