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Software engineers tend to assume that (a) they are the smartest in the room, (b) legislation is exactly like code, (c) caselaw doesn't exist and (d) nobody has
by jacques_chester 8y ago
Software engineers tend to assume that (a) they are the smartest in the room, (b) legislation is exactly like code, (c) caselaw doesn't exist and (d) nobody has ever had to write complex rules before software was invented. All of which, we feel, qualifies us to poke holes in any legislation we happen to stumble across.
But, of course, it doesn't. Not even close.
By way of analogy, if someone looked at a link to a github repo and said "yeah well I can't see any GOTO 10 lines, I bet this will crash when the IP trace becomes Apache'd" I hope someone would be patient and polite in explaining the several levels of wrongness involved.
- zaarn 8y agoThere are jurisdictions were caselaw doesn't exist (which a lot of software engineers also conveniently forget a lot of the time) or law is written differently from the anglo-american legislations (which software engineers also conveniently forget a lot)
- jacques_chester 8y agoThat the doctrinal basis is different does not change that law requires interpretation by experts using something more sophisticated than "it's just code". Civil jurisdictions don't have caselaw as an independent source of legal rules, but they still have cases and they still have interpretation. It is not uncommon for an ancient Roman jurist's opinion to be cited in argument in Scots law, just as it is not uncommon to cite very old English cases in Australian law. And it is also common to have civil codes in common law jurisdictions -- the criminal law I was taught was based on a statutory instrument which asserted itself to be the whole of the criminal law and which was frequently amended whenever courts began to accrete rulings around it.