The headline is funny, but the opinion is boring and obvious. The act itself defines the term "fish":

    ‘[f]ish’ means a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate,
    amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”

It's just a technicality. A statute was written using the term "fish" in a bunch of places, and rather than replace "fish" with "fish, mollusk, invertebrate, &c" in every place where that term was used, they just changed the definition. Every statute you'll ever read has explicit definitions, presumably for this exact reason.

Fun fact: for a time, according to Dave Arnold, the Catholic church defined beavers as meat, but beaver tails as fish. You could eat the tail on a Friday, but not the rest of the beaver.

BurningFrog

So instead of refactoring, they hacked around it, and now the law is that much harder to read.

Law making and programming are quite similar in some ways, and share some pathologies.

Diris

Law making is kinda logic programming[0]. Someone even wrote the constitution of Japan in prolog ! [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming

[1] https://github.com/bitlaw-jp/the-constitution-of-japan