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Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org

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Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#41
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

> I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

That's a very government centric point of view.

Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...

See also the exokernel papers like https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2008/readings/engler95exoke... or via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

Traditional operating systems try to help programs securely share resources, but also want to provide abstractions away from the raw hardware. An exokernel approach limits itself to just the secure multiplexing, and delegates abstractions to another mechanism much better suited for the task: user space libraries.

To close out the tangent: I wonder how you would bring this metaphor back to laws? I guess it would have something to do with Subsidiarity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#42
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

The law can turn out to be different from what everyone thought. A higher court can reverse it. Even in the highest court, stating the definitive law, justices often dissent. So the idea that the law actually exists, and we just have to find it, doesn't seem correct. Given that judges were usually barristers before, it's more like: one barrister confidently argues that the law has always been X, the opposing barriste…

Btw, not all jurisdictions even care about precedence. So courts can't reverse anything.

(Though in practice precedence seems to have about equal value in common law and civil law jurisdictions. In common law, the court just has to nitpick enough to find a difference between the current case and the precedent, to argue why the latter should not apply. In civil law, courts routinely defer to precedence as a matter of convention and habit.)

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this explains the propensity for lawsuits in the US. It's basically our regulation and enforcement mechanism.

Exactly. Yes. That's the idea. The US legal system relies more on "ex post" legal enforcement - meaning, if you break the law then you get busted and you personally pay the victim. Europe is a more "ex ante" system - they rely on regulators to strictly define what the law should look like exactly and actually requires industry to do very specific things to comply with it. If someone gets hurt the system compensates t…

UK doesn't seem to have quite as much suing as the US? And they also have a common law system.

In contrast, German military procurement is famous for its endless lawsuits.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but at the same time, you're addressing a community where we do a lot of free work. The world wouldn't run without the open source unpaid software that we build. I can't critique you for this choice, as it is quite reasonable. But I can say that such publication can help others (potentially a reward in itself) and can help drive customers to you, who recognize that more nuance is necessary than what can e…

Fair enough. Thanks. But... When I offer to do this here no one takes me up on it! So maybe the world doesn't need my blog.

Maybe it is the phrasing. I think it might help if you followed a format like

Lawyer in tech here. I find these types of articles often disappointing because the focus on technicalities rather than the real takeaways. For example, the article points out but the take away is . If anyone has additional questions I'd be happy to answer

I think this would generate more engagement. Personally, I have so little knowledge in this space I don't even know what a good question to ask is. I suspect that this is quite common but that it's unlikely to be admitted. You know how us CS people are, we spend a weekend hacking on something and declare domain expertise lol.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#45
post #43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Yes. That's the idea. The US legal system relies more on "ex post" legal enforcement - meaning, if you break the law then you get busted and you personally pay the victim. Europe is a more "ex ante" system - they rely on regulators to strictly define what the law should look like exactly and actually requires industry to do very specific things to comply with it. If someone gets hurt the system compensates t…

UK doesn't seem to have quite as much suing as the US? And they also have a common law system. In contrast, German military procurement is famous for its endless lawsuits.

[deleted]

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#46
post #2

What about the opposite? Computer Science for lawyers?

The typical lawyer knows more about computers and programming, than a typical programmer knows about the law. I think this is the case for most fields with respect to programming.

That doesn't match my experience.

But more importantly, there are areas of the law that require fairly comprehensive understanding of computer systems, both on the development, infrastructure and applications such as data science to properly understand. (Not understanding the tech makes it impossible to fully understand the law).

For instance, if an average lawyer tasked with ensuring that a company is in compliance with GDPR, and come across terminology such as "Data Protection by Design & Default" with further references to "Pseudonymization" and "Anonymization", will they even know how to start a review of the present situation in an organization for these topics?

My experience is that there is often a significant gap between where the understanding of the legal team ends and where the development and data science teams take responsibility that isn't covered by anyone.

The main problem is that legal coverage of data protection topics (such as [1]) often do not prescribe very specific specifications for how to be compliant. Instead, it requires people to use good judgement. Someone with a background in law will be used to this, but will usually not understand the technology well enough to have developed the kind of intuition needed to do so.

And when they sit down with a team of typical engineers, communication can get really difficult. The engineers tend to want very specific instructions on what to do, and many will not react well if confronted with the relatively loose (for an engineer) legal language.

Some will just ignore the parts they don't understand, while others will go to the other extreme and propose draconian measures that will at best be extremely costly. The latter group tends to be ignored by management.

In the end, many compliance initiatives end up with a lot of forms that serve as little more than window dressing, but where the hard bits that nobody really understand end up ignored.

To really achieve compliance, an organization will need people who are (in the same person) able to read legal texts with a lawyer's ability to interpret combined with the ability think like a black hat hacker trying to penetrate, a paranoid operations person terrified of data loss or a shady data scientist that keeps taking all sorts of shortcuts.

Few organizations have such lawyers available.

[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#47
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of law and what type of programming? Everyone has to be aware of computers these days, but that doesn't make them know anything about programming. Meanwhile, in between traffic laws, financial laws (taxes, particularly), employment law, invention patent laws, maybe real estate/permitting laws, a programmer and any person in society needs to have some knowledge of the law to exist more than a lawyer needs to…

Generally, what the average programmer "knows" about the law is the equivalent to what the average lawyer "knows" about programming: the superficial, easy stuff that you can pick up without any actual training or effort.

Virtually every grown-up will interact with the law multiple times per day, especially traffic laws. Half the population has not written a single computer program in their life.

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#48
post #18
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

When you include common-law and look at the broader cycle, I'd argue the legal system is more like a JIT optimization rather than source code: We formalize and streamline lots of existing implicit social rules and shared expectations, things that exist-before and can operate-without any formal legal text... Just not as well. In other words, the relationship is more like recipes versus cooking. People cooked foods fir…

thou nobody ever got put in jail because he defied the recipe

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#49
post #16

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching. I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

Law is basically man made math. You have laws which can be seen as axioms and lawyers essentially use the existing axioms to prove to a judge a certain conclusion

Re: Law for Computer Scientists (2020)

#50
post #10

This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels and choices of abstractions are different.

The book covers both. I think you were too hasty to get this criticism posted to HN that you made an assumption about the book by its cover. The author is in the UK and this was published by Oxford, which are common law jurisdictions. For example, I turned to a random part about copyright: "In the continental European tradition, the focus has been on the author and the work. This understanding of ‘authors’ law’ built…

What does that have to do with actual US copyright jurisprudence?
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