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Judge Doesn't Know What a Web Site is
An anonymous reader writes "A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like "Web site" in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.
Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.
"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is". he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.
Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts.""
The judge wasn't so proud as to pretend understanding and then issue a potentially unjust ruling.
Would that all judges had the same strength of character in this regard.
Give him credit for admitting he didn't understand. Clearly he needs to be able to understand the concept in order to rule on the case. What are the options when a judge just doesn't understand? Do we need a "technical" set of judges to handle these types of cases?
Cheers.
Mark
Looks like everyone took the sensationalist bait on this.
Article is pretty light on details but it seems like the judge is trying to understand what a website actually "is"...it seems like an issue in this case is where the defendants' activities took place.
So perhaps he realized he needed to know more than "a window that comes up on your computer" as far as what a website is. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a 59-year-old in a completely non-technical job to not know how a website is put together; "what is a website?" is a feasible way to ask not only "describe this thing to me", but also "what makes up this thing?". Maybe he was asking the latter.
I agree. I have a handful of friends that graduated with CS degrees in order to enroll in law school.
My opinion is that our minds are already geared for the IF definition THEN result, EXCEPT WHEN whatever kind of language that most laws that I've read are written in.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
so perl then.
I'm all set.
In reality, I was asked if I was pre-law or a paralegal when I asked an attorney to review my response to Farmers C&D letter on my gripe site. I consider that to be high praise.
As to this judge, he should recuse himself from the case, but should also be lauded for admitting his limitations.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I imagine that you were played with. This is how lawyers have to talk to expert witnesses in court - they need to start from some baseline, and work there way down to what they want to know. She was doing exactly the same thing to you - and eventually got to the boundary of your knowledge in the area, showing that you might not be the best witness in that respect. She was practicing. I bet shes one hell of a lawyer at trial, as you fell for this hook line and sinker.
(and perhaps I'm being a touch naive, but I think that this is a bit more likely than not knowing that the earth revolved around the sun)
Nearly every reply I see here falls into one of two categories:
- "Wow, what a stupid judge! He doesn't know what a website is, like we teh smaert peoples do!!!"
- "No, the guy is wise to admit his limitation, and ask us, the smaert peoples who know what a website is, to tell him."
The tacit assumption is that it's perfectly clear what a "web site" is.Now, of course, I'm going to call that assumption into question. What is a web site? How do you tell where one web site ends, and where another starts? Is Geocities a web site? Is it rather a collection of web sites? Is it both, simultaneously? How does this decision interact with other legal reasoning that may be relevant to the case? What criteria ought to be applied in the kind of case he's handling?
The judge's supposed "admission" of "ignorance" could, for all that we know from TFA, not be because the judge has no concept of what a website is; it could be because his concept of what a website is is good enough for using, um, web sites, but not good enough for deciding this particular case.
Are you adequate?
I thought about that when I was "picking my profession", and I did talk to some lawyers and others I knew. At first it seemed a natural fit for me, but as I dug in deeper, I discovered that it wasn't as black and white as I'd hoped.
First, as another poster indicated, there's lots of "if then but else if" clauses. As black and white as a case my appear at first glance, the law is very gray. One can have two courts arrive at two entirely different conclusions on the same basic point, and then the appeals court decide to not take it up because the case isn't interesting. At that point, the implication is that both courts are right (or maybe they're both wrong), but it's no longer a simple truth. Don't even get me started on what one lawyer told me about the words "reasonable" and "prudent" in the context of any legal code.
Second, as strange as it may seem, a lot of practicing law is a matter of avoiding the real issue at hand. Take the SCO case - very little time has been spent addressing the case itself. Almost all the time has been spent on discovery motions, procedural arguments, evidence rules, etc. As a geek, I like to see results fairly quickly in a repeatable and consistent manner. If you told me that I had to write a perl program to compute the area of a triangle, I'd say cool. However, if you then told me that first I had to prove the theorem I'll use, but first I have to agree on the method in which my theorem will be proved, but first I have to decide whether the requester even has standing to ask me to write a program...you get the idea.
Third, I don't disagree on your point about geeks making good researchers. Certainly there's no question we're good at digging stuff up. What remains to be seen is whether we're good at digging everything up. This goes back to my other points. In a way, legal research is like the halting problem - you're never 100% confident that you've pulled every relevant law and ruling. Legal researchers also have to be completely free of bias. Most geeks I know (myself included) tend to feel very strongly on certain issues, and it's only natural that we'd favor facts that support our bias and disfavor those that don't. A good researcher can research the hell out of an issue that they vehemently oppose for the side that they despise. That takes something beyond being good at Google and Lexus.
I don't think he should step down. As a judge, he is an expert in the law; that is why he is there. I would expect that he has probably seen hundreds of cases where he doesn't understand the terminology - he cannot be expected to be an expert in every subject.
As a judge, he is there to apply his understanding of the law to the case; if he doesn't understand a term that is important to the case, he should be expected to admit it and to find out about it, but not to hand the case over (and cause it to be restarted) every time he hears something that he doesn't understand.
It's like me, a web developer, being asked to make a website about law. I don't understand law, I don't understand the terms, but I am an expert in making websites. I am there to apply my understanding of how to make a website; if I don't understand a legal term that is important to the website, I should be expected to admit it and find out about it, but not to resign every time I hear something that I don't understand.
Sure, this time it may be that he doesn't understand what a website or a forum is - if that was someone in the computing world then yes, they should step down. But this is the whole point of having professionals - acknowledge that there are people who understand more than you, and that you need to go and ask them for help so that you can do your job properly. A lot of people I know in the computing world could learn a valuable lesson from this judge.
He is a judge, and does not need to know about IT. He would probably know what a car was, because I imagine that either he drives one, or is driven in one. He has probably heard of a computer, his secretary probably uses one, he has no doubt heard of the internet and websites, and has probably seen the odd URL or two. However, I wouldn't expect him to understand what they were, and would far rather he admit it than stumble on blindly. Being out of touch with IT just means that he has better or more important things to do than use computers; granted, a foreign concept to most of us on Slashdot, but many people in other industries get by just fine without using anything more complicated than a telephone - that's what secretaries are for.
By asking for an exact definition of a website, it does not preclude his ability as a judge to pass judgement on the case; it merely builds a solid base of understanding (for judge and jury alike) for the expert witness to build upon when they call him later in the week, and demonstrates the sensible and professional attitude of the judge. It is far better to be ruled by men who know their limits, than men who declare that the internet is made of tubes.