Slashdot Mirror
Law Documents in a Nutshell
Ramakrishnan M writes "LawMeme has a two part article (more to come) on reading and interpreting Legalese for geeks, titled "Law School in a nutshell". Here is the Part 1 and part 2"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
However, I do plan on going to school for law, combat DRM, Pallidum, ect. Article has a lot of good information in it, even if you don't plan on being a lawyer.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Unlike 99% of the crap you'll read here, I AM a lawyer, however, this article has a lot of good information in it, even if you don't plan on being a lawyer.
LawMeme gets sued by O'Reilly for use of word 'nutshell'. Trademark Lawsuit....
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Clearly this was a collaborative effort of Dan Gookin, original author of DOS and C "for Dummies," and Mr. Rogers, of the Mr. Rogers fame. You think a 15-year old posing as a lawyer is odd? How about 6 year old dummies (the logical mixture of the two audiences)?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Also, 43% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
VI RULES!
That should do. *runs for cover*
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
Subject says it all.
On Citations...
XXX U.S. XXXX (19XX): That's the official citation of a case. Often, if you go into a library, you won't find an official reporter (and you probably wouldn't want the official reporter, anyway). Lexis and West Publishing put out what are called unofficial reporters, the Lawyer's Edition (L.Ed.) and....I can't remember the other one at the moment IIRC (Supreme Court Reports). These have all sorts of annotations that lead you to other important info regarding the case, or cases cited within the decision. Sometimes in the decision itself, if you're not familiar with a case that's cited by the writer, you won't understand the argument. Some judges are especially obtuse (think writing code without good comments).
The Brief:
Here's the thing....the brief is far from the full story when considering a case. The brief puts one side's best spin on the case. It's designed to be persuasive, as well as being informative. Both sides submit them, blah blah blah. But, especially in cases before the Supreme Court, other factors come into play. A well-written amicus brief can have quite a bit of influence; even if the two parties involved do not solicit it, nor endorse it.
After the all the briefs are submitted, the justices hear oral arguments, where they're free to clarify things that don't make sense.
In a sense, the briefs discussed in this article are Release Notes on the case....they make the argument, but don't tell the full story.
I think I'm alergic to legalese or something. Even looking at the dumbed down version is making me sick.
:-P
--
If you think it makes you sick, just try that ugly little line they start off with - #!usr/bin/legal - in a bash script.
Try it as root. Watch your machine e-mail Linus, asking him to sue you for "Trademark abuse, irreparable harm and emotional damages".
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Or 'idem' and 'id' are both short for ibidem.
But like I said IANAL, I just took a few years of latin...
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
The first few paragraphs have me reeled in... this is really scary - it totally makes sense! I truly am a geek. Well there are worse things... I could be a lawyer!
I appreciate the attempt to inform, but it seems to me this falls into the category of "a little bit of knowledge is dangerous". The pages bill themselves as "3 years of law school in a nutshell", as if you'd get a quick overview of relevant law for geeks. However, it is an analysis of one particular court filing, and based on my 15+ years dealing with legal docs and lawyers (as a techie, IASNAL), I didn't find a scrap of it relevant to software licensing, employment contracts, stock option agreements, or confidentiality agreements. You may find it entertaining, but it's not going to help you deal with the legal issues that you come across in the real world.
With all of the legal Ask Slashdot questions, why don't more lawyers advertise on Slashdot?
I was wondering if we could get a Law School Chicks for Geeks book too... They're really cute, but I don't know how to ask one on a date without getting sued.
The more people who think they know the law but are unaware of its subtleties and precedants make for a less intelligent exchange of ideas and more "I know what I'm talking about, listen to me, not them" type of exchanges.
I know this for two reasons: I come from a family of lawyers and legal experts, and I tend to fall into the "I'm correct, damnit!" category I just mentioned. Therefore, I'm usually shot down by the legal minds in my family, even when I'm being particularly intelligent in my own right, or *cough* quoting a piece of "+5 Insightful" legal advice gleaned from slashdot.
There is no substitute for a real legal education and pursuing real-world applications (be you a judge, law professor, trial lawyer or law clerk). I guess what I'm really attempting to say is that thinking you know something is no replacement for actually knowing that thing. Not that having a law degree makes you eligable to offer legal advice (I wouldn't ask an IP lawyer for help with closing on a house), but it does place you in better standing.
Use this article to help you better understand the legal document you are reading, do NOT use it to further legal advice to others -- that is not what this article, or any other like it, is meant for.
</rant>
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
"I'll take patent law for 500, Alex"
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Haynes books have been banned because too many people were deluded into thinking they understoods mechanics' lingo, Home Depot has been shut down to avoid furthering the delusions of millions of do-it-yourselfers, The Motley Fool has been served with cease and desist papers, O'Reilly, Wrox, and many many other publishers have been hit with restraining orders, can millions of cat and dog owners have been served with restraining orders prohibiting them from coming closer than 100 yards to pet stores.
Infuriate left and right
Beyond all law, beyond all legal precedent, beyond all unbiased opinion however, is the one true cardinal law - that all judgements ultimately come down to a judge, a panel of judges, or a jury, who lay down a verdict as they see fit. They must rationalize and have good reasoning for their decision, but time and time again lawyers after a case scratch their head and say "Wow, I can't believe I lost (or won) that case!"
It's for this reason that you can always TRY to sue, no matter how silly the claim, because you just might win, even if the laws of the past seem against you.
What we really need is a tutorial on GeekSpeak for lawyers. That would teach them things like:
I enjoyed the article, but I dislike the fact that this tends to enforce the idea that code==law.
Code isn't law. Protocols are like law. Code that follows (or breaks) the protocols is not law, but more like agents under the law. Saying that code==law is like saying that drivers are the motor vehicle code.
Now, certainly it should be illegal to misrepresent code as being compliant to a protocol when it isn't (e.g., MSFT Kerberos). However, the code itself shouldn't be illegal--only the misrepresentation.
The distinction is important, because certain Free Software zealots are trying to use the code==law argument to convince people that software should be Public (they like to say Free when what they really mean is Public, like the Public School System), and perhaps even that private software should be outlawed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think they do not really care.
...
They make "phat l3wt5" regardless.
A solid 10 year plan:
1) become lawyer
2)
3) $$$
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
The moderation totals for the parent comment are (at the time of my posting): Moderation Totals: Troll=1, Total=1.
:-) )
Uhh... I'm not entirely sure how to read that, but I choose to believe that it means that this comment started out at 2 and got knocked down to 1 Troll.
Why? What's the point of modding down? It should be obvious the poster is playing out the ancient vi vs. \non_vi_editor/(1) *for fun*.
I bet the moderater doesn't even know what the heck the poster's talking about when he says, "Quirk's Exception to Godwin's Law applies here." Of course, I don't either! But I'm not gonna go modding down things I don't understand.(2)
Footnote 1: It's supposed to be "vi vs EMACS", but since vi is so weird, I think a person could argue vi vs. just about any other editor. (For the record, I don't really care for vi or EMACS too much. Although, I suppose I may one day familiarize myself with vim.)
Footnote 2: It's sort of like what Tegan said to the Master: "This'll teach you not to meddle in things you don't understand!" And, of course, that is just one example of the more general sci-fi principle summed up so eloquently by Joel Robinson when he says of some random mad scientist: "He tampered in God's domain." And, of course, all this goes back to the Tower of Babel and/or the Tower Struck By Lightning tarrot card.
(oh btw, one last thing--today I found out that the commercial for Millyways ("If *you've* done six impossible things this morning...") is very similar to something the white queen says in "Alice In Wonderland" (warning, quote may not be exact): "I've found that, with practice, I can believe at least six impossible things before breakfast." It's a happy day.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
But what animal should be on the cover of O'Reilly's "Law In A Nutshell" ? A shark ?
Seneca College's Faculty of Continuing Education offers a terrific course. It's meant as an elective, but anyone can take the course even if they're not pursuing a diploma. It gives you a great overview of the Canadian legal system, and it's taught by a lawyer who obviously loves the law and its practice, and is very enthusiastic.
I'd recommend the course for anyone living in Toronto.
The course is _Law and the Citizen_, CAN271.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
By far - the most important thing for geeks to know about the law is: that the law is not something that geeks understand; the law is something that geeks think they understand.
What I mean by that is this: if technical people agree on a set of rules or protocols - that is the way things are - virtually without exception. If a program fails to abide by a protocol - it generally won't work.
The law looks similar and so we think we understand what is going on; we are wrong.
The law is nothing of the kind; the law is quite literally what ever a clever lawyer can talk a judge or jury into believing at that given moment. As such it has a malleable quality quite unacceptable to anyone who has the ability to think honestly.
Imagine the chaos that would rule in the technical world if clueless pointy hair bosses controlled - from minute to minute - based purely on whim - what protocols meant. That is an accurate description of the situation in the legal world.
The law is a system constructed by weasel brains for the benefit of weasel brains and nothing else. Of course the weasel brains realize that if the thinkers ever catch on to what is happening to them - that the game is over. Because of that the weasels go to great lengths to insure that no one who is honest and intelligent ever looks too closely and critically at the basic design and structure of the law. The law is designed so that if the technically sharp study it that they will be so surrounded by trees that they will never notice the shape of the forrest.
If this causes you realize that the law is, in fact,nothing but a gigantic fraud of the first magnitude - then you have begun to understand what is going on in the world.
The law - a real time operating system for life critical functions - consisting of billions of lines of code - not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
rules are more likely to be read, understood, remembered, followed, and enforced, and at a lower cost.
Right... because we could operate our society only on the Ten Commandments, no? You're right in some utopian kind of way, but the reason that our legal system (not to mention pretty much ANY legal system in the world) is so complex is because we CAN'T operate our society only on the Ten Commandments. Imagine the "injustice!", the "unfairness!" of a society like that. Humans being naturally sympathetic, we would almost immediately write exceptions to the rules ("Thou shalt not kill... unless in self defense"), and subrules to the main ones ("Thou shalt not steal... But if the value if that which has been stolen is less than $50, thou is guilty of a misdemeanor; otherwise, a felony"). And don't get me started on the difficulty of an entire society deciding on a set of SIMPLE rules. This is the way a complex society MUST form its legal system, lest we live in a tyrannical, fascist world.
1. The article is right-on as far as the law being a system not unlike a computer (although there are human foibles and biases built in on many levels). As my former .sig says, Laws are ROMS, courts are CPUs.
2. Going to law school is a shitty career move, at least money-wise, for a computer geek. Aside from the three years of negative income, big law firms won't hire you unless you go to Harvard or some "top 25" law school and/or your grades are good enough to get on law review. Your IT skills are mostly irrelevant to the law job market. If you have an engineering degree you might possibly be able to get into patent law. If you enter private practice, you will discover that....
3. Computer geeks make crappy law clients. They already think they know everything. They are far happier as pro pers (people who try to represent themselves in court as their own lawyers).
4. IT pays better and you don't have to deal with shit from clients, some of whom will lose in court because they deserve to, and will then be pissed at you and file bogus bar complaints and malpractice suits. Did you rent Cape Fear?
5. Some clients are insane (see (3)).
And yet if we go too far towards complexity we got tyrannical and fascist as well.
I submit that as soon as it becomes factually correct to say "The law is too complex to understand without a law degree", that it is too complex to exist in its current form. If I can be convicted for breaking a law that I've never heard of, despite not having lived in the Montana wilderness all my life, that law is too obscure. When laws get passed (or repealed) and the people aren't made aware of them in a form that is reasonably expected to be understood by those people, those laws shouldn't be binding.
It might be hard to write a complex legal system in such a way that the Average Joe with a high-school education can understand it, but I don't think we can call ourselves a free country until we can either come up with a simple legal system, or a smarter Average Joe. The legal system could be simplified a lot. Remove obsolete laws. When new laws are provided, if they overlap old laws, just rewrite the old laws, ideally. If the laws aren't written in language that everyone can understand, they won't be able to obey the law, so don't bother passing it until it's written in plain english.
And one thing that would help, write the entire legal code in a hyperlinked form. Let people start at simple overviews and unfold more detail as they go. A heading about as basic as "Thou shalt not kill" could eventually fold out into the laws against euthenasia, with links to other laws that are relevant in the discussion.
This way people could start to understand the system without being handed a huge book and told to flip through it. It'd actually let people look up the laws in a specific area to get a quick idea. They'd still (in today's system) need a lawyer if it was a gray area, but at least they could find out enough to ask the right questions and provide background.
NOLO Press ("Please Don't Feed The Lawyers") needs to be mentioned here. Not only to they publish some really great legal books for non-lawyes, but they also have several "Plain English Law Centers", including a legal encyclopedia, dictionary, FAQ, and so on.
:)
I'm not affiliated with NOLO, except for the fact that I'm a very satisfied customer. I've started and run a couple of small technology businesses, and dealt with a fair amount of IP (both patent and trademark) and contract law issues, and NOLO books are great for educating yourself about what the real legal issues are, and when you really need to get an attorney involved.
-Mark
(IANAL, but my wife is -- and she approves of NOLO