Legal Definitions - avoision

Avoision refers to an action or strategy that exists in a gray area between what is clearly legal avoidance of a rule or law and what is clearly illegal evasion of it. It describes conduct where it is genuinely ambiguous whether a person or entity is legitimately navigating legal boundaries or subtly circumventing them in a way that pushes the limits of legality.

• Example 1 (Financial Context):

  Company X, a multinational corporation, establishes a complex web of subsidiary companies in various countries, some with very low tax rates. These subsidiaries engage in intricate internal transactions, such as licensing intellectual property or providing management services to each other. While each individual transaction might technically comply with the specific tax laws of the countries involved, the overall structure and the primary intent behind its extreme complexity make it difficult for tax authorities to determine if it's a legitimate business arrangement designed to optimize operations (legal tax avoidance) or if its main purpose is to artificially shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions to minimize global tax liability in a manner that borders on illegal tax evasion.

  This is avoision because the company isn't outright hiding income or falsifying records (which would be clear evasion). Instead, it's using the letter of various tax laws in a highly aggressive and convoluted way, making it ambiguous whether they are cleverly avoiding higher taxes through legal means or subtly evading their tax obligations by exploiting loopholes and creating artificial structures.

• Example 2 (Regulatory Context):

  A social media platform introduces a new feature that collects user data for "personalized content recommendations." While their terms of service broadly state that user data may be used to improve services, the platform implements this feature in a way that makes it extremely difficult for users to understand the full scope of data collection or to opt out effectively. The company argues it is simply avoiding more stringent data privacy requirements by relying on existing, broad consent. However, privacy advocates contend that the design intentionally obscures the data collection process, effectively evading the spirit of informed consent and user control that privacy regulations aim to uphold.

  This situation exemplifies avoision because the platform isn't directly violating a specific data privacy law (which would be evasion). Instead, it's operating within the technical boundaries of its user agreements and existing regulations, but in a manner that is so opaque and difficult to navigate that it blurs the line between legitimate data usage avoidance and a subtle evasion of users' privacy rights and regulatory intent.