Hi @bengy, interesting question(s)!

I don't think this can be answered through "either/or" thinking. In most cases, I would submit that laws tend to be more flexible when they are new, and get more fixed as they are tested and reasonable exceptions either present themselves, or not.

Should I get a ticket for pointing the wrong way on a one-way street because I GOT there because a swerved to avoid a child on a bicycle, and it was the only place I could go that wouldn't involve plowing through someone's fence?

Of course, then the possibility exists that we can make laws absolute, but the penalty for breaking them highly flexible.

"Well, you did break the one-way street law, but since the outcome was saving a child's life, we only fine you a symbolic $1.00 for breaking the law."

On the other hand, the clearly drunk person going the wrong way on the one-way loses their license for six months and gets a $1000 fine.

The strangest "law" I have seen that was still on the books when we lived in Texas was a county-wide law stating that it was illegal for anyone to have... ummm... "marital relations"... before noon on Sundays. As best I could find out, it was created to make sure that happy "Saturday night celebrators" properly showed up in church in the 1800s, in this rather religious part of the USA!