"hard cases make bad law" meaning in English

See hard cases make bad law in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proverb

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-hard cases make bad law.wav
Head templates: {{en-proverb}} hard cases make bad law
  1. (law) An extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases. Categories (topical): Law
    Sense id: en-hard_cases_make_bad_law-en-proverb-O453Wvxo Topics: law
  2. (law) A general law is better drafted for the average circumstance. Categories (topical): Law
    Sense id: en-hard_cases_make_bad_law-en-proverb-62fBZ2ft Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English proverbs, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 43 57 Disambiguation of English proverbs: 28 72 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 36 64 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 10 90 Topics: law
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        "(law) An extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.