Great analysis. Even though we see the warts all of the time, I'm so incredibly impressed by "law," and I didn't get to this point until I was well out of law school. Why I'm impressed is how well the law holds itself together in the face of the massive weight of influences that have every reason in the world to try to corrupt it. It's just all too easy to speculate (or read historically) how easy it is to corrupt th…
Great point. The difficult thing, on this forum, is it is weighted towards younger and very accomplished computer scientists. Sometimes the impulse, when seeing complexity that's hard to understand (medicine, regulation, law), is to be frustrated and dismiss it. Law is amazing and much older than programming, and one of the underrated human inventions. The fact we aren't constantly killing each other over small dispu…
And boy does it show. Recent events have me examining The Supreme Court and American law from a programmers perspective. And let me tell you, there are warts:
The Supreme Court is comprised of lifelong appointees, mostly in the dwindling twilight of their cognitive ability. This made sense when we didn't understand cognitive decline. Now with the rapid pace of technological progress, it's a joke. To be plain, I don't know of any ICs their age able to keep up. They move up or age out.
The whole legal rationalist ideal that you can start from the base principles of the constitution and reason up indefinitely is ridiculous. We programmers have all sorts of tooling to navigate code bases larger than we can readily keep in our heads. That tooling regularly fails us. The best programmers I've worked with regularly hit compiler errors. This all happens in the sterile environment of code. Why should I believe that judges, who can't even agree on whether to interpret the constitution in a modern lens or hold to its writers original intentions, are less susceptible to irrationality or bias or plain incompetence with far less tooling? A lot of modern psychology suggests they can't.
For all you programmers out there, read a handful of legal documents. As far as complex logical reasoning goes, it comes off like a kid building a treehouse compared to code for even simple web apps. The legal profession needs to recognize its limitations and catch up with the times. Here are some ideas:
- Rigorous, regular cognitive testing after for all licensed legal professionals older than 45. You have to pass a test to drive in old age, but you can sentence someone to life in prison no problem.
- Term limits for everyone, everywhere.
- In certain cases, law should embrace statistics. Certain cases aren't suited for proposition-like rule based reasoning. Law needs a larger tool chest that can make argument based not on precedent, but on what exists right now in American society.