A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
What standard does a court use to set a more relaxed upper bound? What's it relaxed in comparison to, if there was no previous more-rigid bound to begin with? And if the court did set some very permissive high bound, it could be so porous as to be worthless. And what's worse, the legislature might have little incentive to bother improving it. Plus, arbitrary rulings can get arbitrarily overturned.
That's what happened with Roe v Wade. Instead of the legislature enacting a rule, the court did. Then Congress became complacent and failed to "harden" the Supreme Court's ruling. Then when the winds of justice changed, Dobbs came into effect. But had the legislature passed a law codifying a Roe-equivalent standard, the chances of there ever being enough of a majority in both Houses to overturn it plus a president willing to sign a new bill into law would've been minuscule.
In short, the less our lives are governed by some random court imposing national standards upon us that were pulled out of the court's honorable ass, the better off we are in the long run.
But what happens when the property is something that cant be reasonably returned in 30 or 60 days? Maybe it's a cruise ship that got seized and needs to be be made sea worthy before being transported? Hard numbers don't allow for edge cases, the vagueness is a feature not a bug.
Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken your stuff, not on the person who's stuff has been taken.
>vagueness is a feature not a bug.
A feature for who? Where's the evedence that law enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge that in this specific case there's a good reason not to do so.
The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug for the individual. Real life doesn't not have time caps. How many days can a person go without food, without a livelihood, without his property that supports his existence? There are time caps for each of these things.
Imagine if prison sentences didn't define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep extending the duration beyond a defined limit.
