101–110 of 113 posts
JACK CADE. Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hoop'd pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,- as king I will be,- ALL. God save your majesty! JACK CADE. I thank you, good people:…
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I hope you don't take this as a flippant comment, because it isn't meant to be, but the answer to your latter question is - it's what the market bears (or did bear). There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.
Quality is very, very difficult to measure in this context. It's a bit like measuring the quality of a doctor or other professional whose advice you need to trust beyond a shadow of a doubt. In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa. The market will sor…
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Most legal work isn't a market, it is a racket. Lawyers in Congress and state houses write deliberately complex, yet often vague, "laws" in order to create business for their pals in the legal guild (where they typically join them after the law passes). They also design various malpractice laws and penalties to generate huge payouts to the legal suits. From health care to IP to shareholder issues, "Lawyer up!" is the…
I'm sorry to disagree with you, but a huge problem in state legislatures is that the congressmembers are NOT lawyers and write legislation that is really costly to sort out when it gets litigated.
What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.
What's an interesting segue to this is that fundamentally the "language understanding" issues are mostly red herrings. The gold standard within the legal profession we are constantly led to believe is to pursue a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English. It is far, far easier…
Now that I am a software engineer, I don't think that any more.
Though law and code have a lot of similarities: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2011/06/27/the-art-of-law/
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I used to do this, too. It drove me crazy that my firm owned my work, though. Perhaps you have a more favorable arrangement with your employer?
I made an arrangement immediately when I started. I told them I do code on the side, and that I had other people that I worked with on that code. They agreed that they pay me for legal work, not for code. Thus, the tools I build are mine, but the analysis and output of those tools may be theirs if I am using the tools for their benefit.
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What's an interesting segue to this is that fundamentally the "language understanding" issues are mostly red herrings. The gold standard within the legal profession we are constantly led to believe is to pursue a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English. It is far, far easier…
When I was a law student, I think as you do: the law could be better replaced with code. Now that I am a software engineer, I don't think that any more. Though law and code have a lot of similarities: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2011/06/27/the-art-of-law/
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When I was a law student, I think as you do: the law could be better replaced with code. Now that I am a software engineer, I don't think that any more. Though law and code have a lot of similarities: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2011/06/27/the-art-of-law/
What changed your mind?
The law isn't complex for the sake of it. The law is complex because the world is complex (cf. essential and accidental complexity). A single person is complex and hard to model reliably -- sure, you can get the first 90% right, but that's not enough. Then you scale that up to pairs of people, people in families, people in businesses and so on.
Law tries hard, very hard, to boil this intractably vast variety down into general, abstract systems. But corner cases frequently arise that don't quite fit the current rules. The rules need to extended by analogy, or broken, or turned inside out, or ignored, or not ... in order to make it work. Every once in a while enough of these little oddities accumulate that a new generality can be perceived.
But, like any model, the first 90% is easy. Everything else is recursively more difficult as you go into sub-sub-sub-sub categories where millions of dollars or people's lives and freedom can turn on a tiny distinction that only humans could, currently, tease out.
I did not come to think of law this way while studying law. It was when I began writing software that I realised how complex the world really is. How difficult it is to change established, complex systems.
The computer is a useful brute, but not too bright. Explaining all those corner cases, all those once-in-a-turquoise-moon exceptions in nauseating detail, is a useful lesson in humility.
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What changed your mind?
Complexity. The law isn't complex for the sake of it. The law is complex because the world is complex (cf. essential and accidental complexity). A single person is complex and hard to model reliably -- sure, you can get the first 90% right, but that's not enough. Then you scale that up to pairs of people, people in families, people in businesses and so on. Law tries hard, very hard, to boil this intractably vast vari…
You do have a point though, perhaps a hybrid approach is best.
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Complexity. The law isn't complex for the sake of it. The law is complex because the world is complex (cf. essential and accidental complexity). A single person is complex and hard to model reliably -- sure, you can get the first 90% right, but that's not enough. Then you scale that up to pairs of people, people in families, people in businesses and so on. Law tries hard, very hard, to boil this intractably vast vari…
But to sacrifice the gains in the first 90% for the sake of the remaining 10% just so that the remaining 10% is handled in a way that is maybe possibly better than what we might have if we went the other route? That sounds like a questionable benefit for a huge cost. You do have a point though, perhaps a hybrid approach is best.
One of the classic moments in the history of common law was the emergence of Equity. It arose because the strict, predictable rules of Common Law as it then existed were leading to what were clearly unjust outcomes.
Sometimes no specific rule can capture the correct action. You need room for judgement. It bugs the everliving daylights out of me that so much of law is undecidable and informal, but it is so out of historical demonstrations that a balance between robustness and strictness is required.
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But to sacrifice the gains in the first 90% for the sake of the remaining 10% just so that the remaining 10% is handled in a way that is maybe possibly better than what we might have if we went the other route? That sounds like a questionable benefit for a huge cost. You do have a point though, perhaps a hybrid approach is best.
The people in the 10% feel otherwise. One of the classic moments in the history of common law was the emergence of Equity. It arose because the strict, predictable rules of Common Law as it then existed were leading to what were clearly unjust outcomes. Sometimes no specific rule can capture the correct action. You need room for judgement. It bugs the everliving daylights out of me that so much of law is undecidable…
The only scope for human error in such a system is the process of coding itself, and massively distributing this and opening that process as much as possible makes any bugs in the system shallow by comparison, as well as easily demonstrable by test cases rather than actually requiring some clueless politician, lawyer or judge to make a terrible decision and someone else to suffer the consequences for it.