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What do lawyers do?

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Re: What do lawyers do?

#121

Post by calvinmorrison »

rootusrootus wrote: post #95
calvinmorrison wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and "the gloves are off". If the entire government just spent 2 years justifying the coerced vaccination of the masses - all thought bodily autonomy thrown out for the greater good? Sure the Rightwingers are happy to play that game as well.

IMO comparing vaccination to women's bodily autonomy is a bad faith argument. Vaccination is about protecting society -- the protection it offers individuals who get the vaccine is incidental. Anti-abortion folks have a stronger argument, IMO, by focusing on the liberty of the unborn child. Both sides refuse to give up ground, however, for political reasons. The logical conclusion is that there is a point somewhere o…

Arguments don't matter, in the end, really

Re: What do lawyers do?

#122

Post by d110af5ccf »

rgifford wrote: post #101
throwaway5752 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Law is amazing and much older than programming... 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 techn…

> mostly in the dwindling twilight of their cognitive ability

Have you actually read SCOTUS trial transcripts? Because they come across as incredibly sharp people to me even when I don't agree with their views.

> A lot of modern psychology suggests they can't.

Actually there are psychology studies examining professionals who have to deal with bias (scientists, judges, etc) that indicate that the competent ones tend to slightly over rather than under compensate.

> Law needs a larger tool chest that can make argument based not on precedent, but on what exists right now in American society.

How is that different than legislating from the bench? Isn't updating laws a job best reserved for the legislature?

Re: What do lawyers do?

#123

Post by Cupertino95014 »

ABCLAW wrote: post #80
thesausageking wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great lawyer can also cause the other side to spend a ton of money responding discovery requests and motions. In fact, a common strategy is to get the other side's legal bill to be so high they eventually give up. I've seen this kill multiple startups who end up in disputes with large tech companies. Even if the startup is 100% in the right, the large co can tie them up in a lawsuit for years and VCs won't back a s…

This isn't a "great lawyer" play . It's the standard play for any unscrupulous party engaged against a party with limited funds. Even if a case is pretty open and shut, you can tie it up for years in motions for little benefit. This isn't hard at all.It's hard to be on the other side and respond to it. A great lawyer can achieve a settlement against a party like this without the need to throw sacks of cash onto a fir…

In fact, I did see this with a friend who was in arbitration with a giant tech company. Supposedly, arbitration is a cost-savings over litigation. I'm sure it is, but that's a little like saying chlamydia is better than syphilis.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#124

Post by d110af5ccf »

rgifford wrote: post #120
billyhoffman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying about declining cognitive abilities, and don’t necessarily disagree. However the lifetime appointment of US Supreme Court justices is a purposeful designed feature, not a bug. It is to foster an independent justice branch that is not beholden to the president that appointed them, because the justice can simply “outlast” the presidents term

> However the lifetime appointment of US Supreme Court justices is a purposeful designed feature... It was a feature in a time when white men lived, on average, to the ripe old age of 38. I'm tired of treating anything the founding fathers came up with as sacred. Different time, completely different context. Economics, psychology, and almost all of STEM didn't even exist then. They did not know what they were doing.…

> a time when white men lived, on average, to the ripe old age of 38

That is a meaningless figure. Those that survived to adulthood had similar lifespans to us.

> I'm tired of treating anything the founding fathers came up with as sacred.

This is a common refrain from people who want to change things as they see fit against the wishes of those who disagree with them. If there were broad consensus to change the law as written then presumably the legislature would vote to do so. You are attacking the credibility of the institution rather than admit that something like half of the country doesn't share your views.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#125

Post by rgifford »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #117
rgifford wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Law is amazing and much older than programming... 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 techn…

You misunderstand. Law is about persuasion - which is to say it's a combination of marketing, power plays, intimidation, theatrical performance, bureaucratic procedure, and politics. The logical (verbal) reasoning element is only relevant in those situations where it can be used as a tool of persuasion. It's not the only tool, and it isn't even the most powerful one. It is absolutely nothing like coding in any sense…

> Law is about persuasion...

Yep, we have an adversarial, common law system. So we measure our lawyers on their ability to manipulate regardless of the moral or social outcome. I don't think this is a facet of law in general, so much as a legal system that hasn't grown past ~1790.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#126

Post by _rutinerad »

staticman2 wrote: post #114
_rutinerad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that a parent has no control over whether their child goes to sleep.

The lawyer can control whether the opposing party settles in the same way I can control whether you retract you post and concede I was correct.

Exactly. And you’re not using that control very well.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#127

Post by knighthack »

rgifford wrote: post #120
billyhoffman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying about declining cognitive abilities, and don’t necessarily disagree. However the lifetime appointment of US Supreme Court justices is a purposeful designed feature, not a bug. It is to foster an independent justice branch that is not beholden to the president that appointed them, because the justice can simply “outlast” the presidents term

> However the lifetime appointment of US Supreme Court justices is a purposeful designed feature... It was a feature in a time when white men lived, on average, to the ripe old age of 38. I'm tired of treating anything the founding fathers came up with as sacred. Different time, completely different context. Economics, psychology, and almost all of STEM didn't even exist then. They did not know what they were doing.…

> Different time, completely different context. Economics, psychology, and almost all of STEM didn't even exist then. They did not know what they were doing. They got lucky in almost every regard.

I disagree. Technology and knowledge changes. Base human nature doesn't.

It's not about "treating anything the founding fathers came up with as sacred". Nor about the average age and baseline knowledge then and now.

It's that humans are subject to influence. And members of the judiciary - decision makers of the most obvious kind - are especially likely to be influenced if their security can be affected by the passage of time.

Sure, the lifetime appointment does not 'guarantee' anything in terms of judicial independence or judicial freedom. But it does enable a judicial member to make decisions, if he/she wants to, in a manner free from the consideration that their politically-'incorrect' choices may cause them to retire, or be retired, early. And that is a security feature that judges must be afforded, however old they may be, in order to let them freely make decisions that they think are the best possible, whether they subscribe to originalist views or are judicial activists.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#128

Post by rland »

jrm4 wrote: post #38

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…

The counter-point would be the criminal legal system, which has spectacularly failed to resist the influence of injustice, and not just historically! I suppose if you have only spent time in civil proceedings (depending on the type of proceeding...) you could hold the view that it is mostly free of corruption. On the federal judiciary, I think we really ought to dispense of the idea that political influence is somehow separate from jurisprudence. Recent events ought to have made that clear.

I'm a little bothered by how sacred the courts are in public imagination. I think it's actually harmful to consider them so. We deny that the courts are a fallible institution, which at times enables and empowers bad actors, at our peril.

Re: What do lawyers do?

#129

Post by lamontcg »

One skill of lawyers is that they understand the context of words and their meaning in the judicial system.

I often see untrained people making arguments on reddit about the law where they're picking apart words into the meaning they want to have them and constructing a legal parallel universe where the law means what they hope it means. And they can point at dictionary definitions for each word to back up their interpretation. And its not that they don't consider something like case law, instead, they just don't even understand that it exists.

Often times when there's two parallel readings which are theoretically possible one of them winds up with implications which are clearly absurd and a real-life flesh and bone judge will outright reject the attempt to twist the meaning of words and phrases. Every now and then a judge somewhere does let this kind of argument through and it makes headlines, but usually those kinds of cases are going to be overturned on appeal.

A lot of the legal system is that everyone over time has agreed that words strung together in a particular way has a particular interpretation that applies. If you go in trying to fight that interpretation you usually always lose. An attempt to buffer overflow the legal system based on dual meanings will usually wind up with a judge disagreeing with your nonsense.

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