"The professor" Valenti spoke of was I. As I said in response, I was 'not aware' because there was no such application. There are hardware devices, but no code. Valenti was simply wrong about the facts, but no doubt angry because I called him the ken starr of cyberspace.
Hal Abelson and I taught a course between MIT and Harvard Law School. Half the students were MIT, half were law students. They were split into groups, each group half-and-half, and each group was assigned a policy problem (privacy, identity, etc.). The assignment in each group was to write a white paper that addressed the policy problem, and the intuition was that the problem could be solved either through law, or through technology, or through a mix of both.
The papers were great, though I found it the most difficult class I had taught (and I did an awful job teaching it.)
The hardest thing was to get both sides to understand a bit of humility. There is something to what law is about: there is a bunch of insights about behavior, and about rights, etc. And there is something to what technology is about: related insights, and important values. What we tried to get both to see is the value in each, and more importantly, the need to integrate the insights of each.
Reagle is a good one from the tech side who is trying this integration. There are a scad of lawyers trying to do the same. But I do think lawyers have the advantage here: the best know they don't know anything, and so the best learn humility as a first lesson.
I've written a little code (not much, not very good, which is why I got a different job) and I've written a lot of legal argument, and I guess I just disagree with the statement "brief-writing is NOT about finding bugs." True, not bugs in the objective sense that code manifests them, but not all of us get to live in the world of code. Legal code, or legal argument, has a different kind of bug - arguments that don't resonate. And while this effort to open legal argument up has just begun, I've already seen in posting and private missives just how blind an author (I) can be.
The question for a brief is whether it compels; it is buggy if it doesn't; and others certainly help a lawyer see where it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
"The professor" Valenti spoke of was I. As I said in response, I was 'not aware' because there was no such application. There are hardware devices, but no code. Valenti was simply wrong about the facts, but no doubt angry because I called him the ken starr of cyberspace.
see the Cyberspace Prosecutor
Hal Abelson and I taught a course between MIT and Harvard Law School. Half the students were MIT, half were law students. They were split into groups, each group half-and-half, and each group was assigned a policy problem (privacy, identity, etc.). The assignment in each group was to write a white paper that addressed the policy problem, and the intuition was that the problem could be solved either through law, or through technology, or through a mix of both.
The papers were great, though I found it the most difficult class I had taught (and I did an awful job teaching it.)
The hardest thing was to get both sides to understand a bit of humility. There is something to what law is about: there is a bunch of insights about behavior, and about rights, etc. And there is something to what technology is about: related insights, and important values. What we tried to get both to see is the value in each, and more importantly, the need to integrate the insights of each.
Reagle is a good one from the tech side who is trying this integration. There are a scad of lawyers trying to do the same. But I do think lawyers have the advantage here: the best know they don't know anything, and so the best learn humility as a first lesson.
Re the "payroll" claim, that is just false. The brief expressly states neither Lemley nor I have been retained by any party in this matter.
I've written a little code (not much, not very good, which is why I got a different job) and I've written a lot of legal argument, and I guess I just disagree with the statement "brief-writing is NOT about finding bugs." True, not bugs in the objective sense that code manifests them, but not all of us get to live in the world of code. Legal code, or legal argument, has a different kind of bug - arguments that don't resonate. And while this effort to open legal argument up has just begun, I've already seen in posting and private missives just how blind an author (I) can be.
The question for a brief is whether it compels; it is buggy if it doesn't; and others certainly help a lawyer see where it doesn't.