More generally, much of the civil law governing business is based on the
legal precedents of case law rather than specific statutes or regulations.
Case law is fundamentally ambiguous in a way that statutory. Law is not. In a very
real sense, many acts are not illegal until a court rules that they are. For example, both the attorneys and the auditors in the Enron case were expected to
"push the envelope” of legality by Enron’s aggressive management practices.
Given that many of Enron’s financial practices were quite literally unprecedented, their attorneys and accountants offered advice that they believed could
be defended in court. Until and unless these acts were challenged in court there
was a real sense in which they were perfectly legal. While admittedly "pushing
the envelope” on accounting and tax regulations, what they did was not obviously illegal.