12 ms·

What do lawyers do?

• groffee 4y ago
  Keep me out of jail hopefully.
  • markrobin 4y ago
  • briantakita 4y ago
    Or putting you in jail...unless you can make it worthwhile for a skillful & determined one to represent you.
• pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- having been through a fair share of business lawyers over the years - i've finally figured out what I like about the guy I settled on - risk assumption & mitigation - my lawyer explains the risks of different approaches - as well as the potential costs - many lawyers I've used in the past are expensive & cause a lot of issues - I'm not a lawyer - I understand business law at a basic level - if my lawyer says: do it this way - I'm inclined to follow that advice - sometimes that advise is exce$$ive - much prefer a lawyer who says: these are the ways it could be done - a sensible & seasoned lawyer is one of more powerful tools a startup can have - interview lawyers till you find the one --
  • berberous 4y ago
    Do you have some sort of personal dislike for the period?
    • atwood22 4y ago
      His lawyer advised him not to end sentences.
      • claydolatry 4y ago
        A lawyer specializing in risk assumption would have advised not to assume gender
        • AussieWog93 4y ago
          Especially when their username is "pigtailgirl" :P
      • adrianmonk 4y ago
        I thought lawyers usually focus on not starting them.
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Excuse me - I'm still talking...
    • pigtailgirl 4y ago
      -- our quake/ut clan used a double dash at the start & end of msg's on forums & irc back in the day - don't recall why our clan leader came up with it - we already had a -[nick|tag]- - either way it stuck with me - the middle dashes mostly because I think they are marginally easier to read - when I write my notes with a dash to separate the thoughts - i've found it's a bit quicker to skim through - happy to change if you find it annoying --
      • formerkrogemp 4y ago
        Fascinating
  • Jugurtha 4y ago
    When I started handling a business, I had stumbled upon several problems dealing with our accounting firm (big 4). I caught several mistakes the people they assigned to our account made (such as including VAT in an six figure invoice that was exempted in a particular case. It almost seems they were working for the revenue service). Worse, once they made a mistake registering a new employee for social security, then sent us a recourse document to sign that stated that we made that mistake. It was classless and unprofessional as they either should have owned that in the document or used the passive voice. Our questions went unanswered. We ended up firing them. When we were looking for a new accountant (another big 4), I made a document with questions that served to interview the lawyer, and all the issues served to draw up the contract and service agreement. I used to see one to two emails per day from the first accounting firm. Our accounting is basic. One enterprise client. One invoice per month. Few employees. Social security cheque every quarter. Taxes every month. Salary bank transfer every month. Nothing fancy, but somehow the first firm managed to screw this up so badly it ended becoming a massive cognitive load.
    • 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      have you thought about trying local small accounting firms/law firms for your taxes as opposed to monolith "big 4?" big 4 people will have the best paid execs and partners but the leg work is made to be done by interns and stuff. On the other hand, in a small firm, its all hands on deck to finish/work on a case. i am a lawyer/accountant in india handling business/litigation of businesses. as a representative of the smaller boutique firms, i would suggest you look up your local firms first as they are more inclined to give more attention and care to your work
      • Jugurtha 4y ago
        >have you thought about trying local small accounting firms/law firms for your taxes as opposed to monolith "big 4?" Yes, and we did. On several instances, we had silly problems like the accountant going to vacation right before tax deadline, other frustrations like communication problems. >big 4 people will have the best paid execs and partners but the leg work is made to be done by interns and stuff. On the other hand, in a small firm, its all hands on deck to finish/work on a case. That was one clause in the agreement as I said. Our account was to be handled by seasoned people and we had put in the contract that they had to answer our questions. Granted, they don't always know what to do, but you're not left hanging, but regulations here are another story. >* smaller boutique firms, i would suggest you look up your local firms first as they are more inclined to give more attention and care to your work* Done that. It's good advice. Maybe for another company but we needed our accounting to be tight given the direction we wanted to go, and the cost of doing so was almost the same as going with a smaller accounting practice.
• voisin 4y ago
  What do barristers do. The author seems to skip the entire solicitor component of the legal profession.
  • fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
    It’s just a set of observations about legal realism using the generic term. You really expected someone to write everything a legal professional does?
    • voisin 4y ago
      My point is that the vast majority of what lawyers do has nothing to do with judges. It has to do with drafting contracts and interpreting legislation and legal precedent. Talking about good lawyers sometimes being able to communicate and coming prepared is limited to a small subset of barrister work. [edit for clarity]: I overstated the first sentence. I should have said that the vast majority of what lawyers do does not involve appearing in court before a judge. The ultimate goal of any legal work is certainly to ensure it would satisfy a judge should a conflict arise.
      • fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
        Incorrect, especially the statement that “the vast majority of what lawyers do has nothing to do with judges. It has to do with drafting contracts and interpreting legislation and legal precedent.” I think you’re confusing arbitration or litigation as the aspects of lawyering which involve judges. In fact, just about all actions undertaken by lawyers are with an eventual audience of a courtroom and a judge in mind. Yes, you review contracts, yes, you interpret legislation: In order to achieve some goal, with an eye toward how it might be interpreted by a judge or opposing counsel. A lawyer that is not proactive about future defense is not fulfilling their duty as counsel and that necessarily means thinking about and considering judges and the courtroom, to one degree or another.
        • voisin 4y ago
          I think we are writing past each other. The article talks about lawyers being good communicators and being prepared, the implication being for court to argue in front of a judge. This is what I am saying is a tiny, infinitesimally small portion of the legal profession as a whole. You changed the topic to be “with an eventual audience of a courtroom and a judge in mind”, which I don’t disagree with. This needs to be the consideration, even though the vast majority of work never ends up having that audience. But this has nothing to do with being a good communicator that shows up prepared, as per the article.
• xbar 4y ago
  "The empirical study of the practice of the law in India is an exercise in the suspension of disbelief." Which is why it is difficult to craft a remote-intellectual-property policy that involves proprietary source code on the ground in many such places.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  One story about India. I didn't go there for the patent case I was on, too bad (I'm not Indian, so please pardon and correct my ignorance if you are). They have barristers and solicitors, like the UK. The barrister is the one who goes to court for you. What I found interesting is, you meet your barrister for about half an hour before he goes to court. That's the extent of your contact with him. His main job is to know the judges, the courts, and the hoops he has to jump through, and your solicitor has prepared him for all that. You hope.
  • groestl 4y ago
    I've witnessed that, in Ireland though, which has a similar system. On a very technical case. The barrister failed to set up WIFI in the meeting room 60 min before going to the court, not even reading the error messages. Which scared me, but then he proceeded to explain the most complicated details in front of the judge. I was stunned.
    • Sharlin 4y ago
      Goes to show that theoretical knowledge doesn't nearly always correlate well (or at all) with practical skill, and vice versa.
      • AlbertCory 4y ago
        You're assuming the barrister doesn't have theoretical knowledge, which I can tell you from experience is not true. Good lawyers have an incredible ability to grasp the theoretical underpinnings of almost anything very, very quickly.
        • Sharlin 4y ago
          Hm? I meant the exact opposite. The barrister in the GP's anecdote had intricate theoretical knowledge of a very technical subject matter, despite not being able (or not bothering) to debug a simple Wi-Fi problem, which surprised the GP.
  • 4y ago
• YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 4y ago
  the jury has absolute power in a courtroom. The judge only conducts.
  • mattzito 4y ago
    In jury trials - for many types of court cases there is no jury.
  • jagged-chisel 4y ago
    In the U.S.
  • eointierney 4y ago
    Eh nope. At least not in common law jurisdictions. I recently sat on a jury (murder trial) in a common law jurisdiction (Republic of Ireland) and the sitting Judge is the judge of Law, and the Jury is the judge of Fact. Apart from that the jury does what it's bloody well told.
  • johndhi 4y ago
    Kinda. The jury is the "fact finder" so only they can decide someone is or isn't guilty. However, a judge has the power to dismiss a case before sending it to a jury. They can say, essentially, this case is easy to decide so we don't need a jury. I'll just decide it now.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    Technically true, and practically questionable because of the psychological way the jury system operates? Which is to say, in the face of that absolutely correct power, the system has developed unfortunately clever ways to make this not seem like the case, see e.g. the undeniable truth, and yet incredibly powerful taboo of even mentioning, "jury nullification."
  • gnicholas 4y ago
    Except the judge’s rulings determine what evidence the jury is shown. And the judge can overrule the jury with a JNOV - a judgment notwithstanding the verdict.
  • 4y ago
• temptemptemp111 4y ago
• roenxi 4y ago
  > In societies somewhere in between, with a flawed rule of law, like India, these predictions are impossibly hard to make. I think this is overselling the stability of the judicial process in the UK, US and other countries with a strong grounding in the rule of law. Without getting to political, sometimes judicial controversies spring up in the US. The issue is there are centuries of norms to fall back on. India doesn't have that yet - they have millennia of history in being the centre of civilisation but not in how the current legal system should be applied under the governance of the sweaty masses of voting Indians. India is going to be more politically dynamic than the US at the moment because it is bigger and its ability to direct itself democratically is a bit younger. So judges are going to be harder to predict regardless of how strong the rule of law is - there is effectively less data even assuming a perfect rule of law.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    > sometimes judicial controversies spring up in the US. I think you are massively understating the instability the SCOTUS has presented in the past few weeks by overturning existing case law.
    • gunfighthacksaw 4y ago
      The repeal of Roe v Wade was a gut punch for me, but I’ve known it was entirely possible for quite a long time. Plus some states have had trigger laws forever so that’s hardly surprising. Yes, there will be instability, but it’s not the chaotic out-of-the-blue kind, unless you’re wilfully ignorant of the anti abortion movement, or extremely naive to the motivations of that bloc.
      • short_sells_poo 4y ago
        As a slight tangent since you seem to be knowledgeable: what is the motivation of the anti abortion bloc? I feel that godliness and a true care for life yet unborn is not it, because the bloc does not exhibit these qualities in many other areas...
• johndhi 4y ago
  I'm a lawyer. This makes some good points not everyone realizes but I'll add some caveats: This is way more relevant in common law countries (US and UK) since in other countries judicial decisions are a lot less important. Also, it's probably a little litigation focused. For transactions lawyers, for example, their value is in negotiating a better deal.
• iasay 4y ago
  Turn problems into money and money into problems.
• quacked 4y ago
  I believe Law is one of the fundamental industries of civilization, along with Textiles, War, Food, Medicine, and Shelter. Without a way for disputes to be settled in a (theoretically) predictable and well-documented manner, the other "fundamental industries" will suffer output and availability problems.
  • Hendrikto 4y ago
    > […] Law is one of the fundamental industries of civilization, along with Textiles, War, Food, Medicine, and Shelter. I think Entertainment is missing from that list.
    • quacked 4y ago
      Entertainment doesn't need to be an industry, that will happen naturally among peers unless it's artificially restricted.
  • formerkrogemp 4y ago
    You forgot entertainment and accounting.
    • notriddle 4y ago
      Also forgot midwifing, babysitting, and education. No professional lives forever, so a civilization must constantly grow and train replacements.
      • quacked 4y ago
        Midwifing is medicine, babysitting is not an industry, and formal education was invented in the 1800s. People have been capable of educating each other and watching children without full-time school for thousands of years, it's only recently that westerners completely forgot how to do it.
        • formerkrogemp 4y ago
• vivegi 4y ago
  IANAL. However, I have worked with lawyers when I worked in a large corp and one thing they did consistently well was highlighting risk and providing the business unit with information on where the landmines lie. One of the very nuanced discussions I had in the last few years was with an IP lawyer when I started my company. His questions and solution was very insightful. I wouldn't have arrived at such an elegant solution myself.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    Same, we paid $10k for a IP lawyer consultation which included 1) 2 hour meeting understanding the details 2) A memo with their judgement and advice, about 4 pages in total, delivered 3 weeks later. During the first meeting, the attorney's assistant was jotting down every detail of our conversation. Questions were so incredibly detailed that it had us scratching our heads. It is always impressive to work with lawyers, especially from a reputable IP law firm.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Great analysis. Even though we see the warts all of the time, I'm so incredibly impressed by "law," and I didn't get to this point until I was well out of law school. Why I'm impressed is how well the law holds itself together in the face of the massive weight of influences that have every reason in the world to try to corrupt it. It's just all too easy to speculate (or read historically) how easy it is to corrupt this kind of power (religion, violence, fear etc) and how this general notion of "No, we're going to dress up like grownups and do our damndest to figure this out with reasoning" is so great.
  • throwaway5752 4y ago
    Great point. The difficult thing, on this forum, is it is weighted towards younger and very accomplished computer scientists. Sometimes the impulse, when seeing complexity that's hard to understand (medicine, regulation, law), is to be frustrated and dismiss it. Law is amazing and much older than programming, and one of the underrated human inventions. The fact we aren't constantly killing each other over small disputes is amazing when you really consider it.
    • daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Many small disputes start as somebody threatening somebody else over like 1¢. Yeah like 1¢, I've gone through that, I've taken somebody to court after escalating the fuck out of a 1¢ cost. Small claims, went alone, the counterparty didn't go to negotiations, I spoke my piece, showed my evidence, corrected their translator because I spoke both languages perfectly, didn't interrupt the judge, suppressed laughter which the transcriber saw and smiled, but that's not harmful...and got everything I asked for, because I asked for exactly what I deserved. Compound interest too, 10% a year, so I can sell that debt to collections or hound that old landlady down myself, which would be a learning experience. Context, she cheated me out of the deposit and now owes me triple plus court costs plus another $45 item she cheated me out of, so like...payback is a bitch. Biggest problem with small claims court, because there is a problem with it...don't sell popcorn. That is a problem, apart from that problem it's great but that is a problem and that means small claims has a problem...they should sell popcorn. And also the amounts are too small, small claims should go up to $50000, courts are the last to adjust for inflation, so it sucks. And the judges get cheated out of wages can't even afford to protect themselves, the jury gets the minimum wage like what the fuck, that's disgusting, they should always get quadruple the minimum wage because they're participating in civil matters which is a legitimate priviledge of a law-abiding citizen. But in court? You can win.
• mypastself 4y ago
  Interesting viewpoint. Never thought of lawyering as essentially professionals contending with their own predictions of a judge’s behavior, but it makes sense. > Law is an impressionistic business, much less scientific than macroeconomics or inflation management It must be pretty unscientific if it’s worse than those.
• howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
  “I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.” ― Voltaire Where US civil litigation (disputes) are concerned, a good lawyer looks to end the dispute before the cost of litigation approaches the value of the dispute. Once might argue the feature and bug of US tort law is the litigation becomes a third party in the case, against whom both sides must fight, hopefully finding a common enemy in its cost. If the cost is not enough to settle the dispute, you can add the unpredictability of judges and juries who on any given day can invert the obvious, wrecking a 'winnable' case. A great lawyer, as opposed to a good one, keeps your fees down as you heads to trial against an opponent with seemingly unlimited money and appetite for litigation. They accomplish this by focusing on the core dispute and ignoring ancillary matters, often making their client (wrongly) question how committed they are to their case. In sum, a good lawyer manages their client (always pushing internally for settlement), works to keep fees down until discovery closes, sows doubt in the other's sides confidence, establishes credibility with the Judge, and shows up meticulously prepared for trial. As a thought exercise, imagine how hard all this is to do when you dislike your client, your managing partner is on you to increase billings, your kids need braces, and you're hoping to save a few bucks for retirement and an escape from a profession filled with bad lawyers.
  • 77pt77 4y ago
    >“I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.” Says the man that made his fortune by winning a lawsuit when he rigged the lottery.
    • kurthr 4y ago
      TIL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voltaire-enlightenment-philosopher-and-lottery-scammer-180967265/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voltaire-enlighten...
  • thesausageking 4y ago
    A great lawyer can also cause the other side to spend a ton of money responding discovery requests and motions. In fact, a common strategy is to get the other side's legal bill to be so high they eventually give up. I've seen this kill multiple startups who end up in disputes with large tech companies. Even if the startup is 100% in the right, the large co can tie them up in a lawsuit for years and VCs won't back a startup actively involved in a lawsuit, so the startup runs out of money before the case is ever decided.
• baron816 4y ago
  What TV has taught me lawyers do: they have a new case every week that goes to trial that week. The case is always won by evidence discovered during the trial, or by testimony of a surprise witness, or an impassioned speech during closing arguments. And the judgement is rendered right there at the end of the trial.
• cainxinth 4y ago
  I have often said that everyone hates lawyers… until they need one, and then they want the meanest SOB who ever practiced.
• rambambram 4y ago
  > Good lawyers can predict what the judge will do, and can write and say things to maximise the odds of the judge doing what you want him to do. And before you go to court, good lawyers and legal advisers look at a case also from the angle of what a judge would ultimately consider. So even if there's no judge around and nobody plans to have a judge around to solve the problem at hand, there's always the 'shadow of the law'. > Law is an impressionistic business, much less scientific than macroeconomics or inflation management, more akin to craft than science. When I went to law school, one of the professors in the first year told us "law is a prescriptive science, not a descriptive science". That was the moment I could not take it seriously anymore, or the moment from when on I had to take it more seriously. Whatever 'serious' might mean in this case. I still don't have a final answer for myself.
• chmod600 4y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but this seems far too narrow, and focused on trial lawyers. For instance, what about corporate lawyers writing up merger agreements? Or estate lawyers helping to plan for after death? Or family lawyers helping people through divorce? Statutes obviously matter in those cases, in the sense that they always matter, but often aren't the main focus. Even criminal stuff doesn't usually go to trial, and it's not because of some amazing insight in reading statutes. It's because often, the criminal is obviously guilty (or has no capacity to express why they are innocent) and it's just a negotiation over the terms of a guilty plea. Part of that is knowing the statute, but most is just knowing what other plea deals have been reached in similar cases recently.
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    You and I appear to be understanding the OP in entirely different ways. The value of a lawyer is not in understanding statutes. It is in understanding the system, and being able to make predictions based on that understanding. From the article: >> Sure, lawyers are (sometimes) good communicators who are (sometimes) well-prepared, but the real value proposition they offer is prediction. Prediction matters in M&A, it matters in estate plans, it matters in divorce litigation. How can you properly prepare a merger without anticipating the things that might go wrong? How can you negotiate a cost-effective divorce settlement if you have no idea how the case will go? How can you plan for, well, what happens after your death, if you can't predict how the financials will play out?
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Science and Law are the twin pillars of modern civilization - from a theoretical point of view. The approaches are fundamentally different - for example, a court will generally not throw up its hands in despair and say "we can't come to a conclusion on this as we don't have the experimental data yet, maybe in a few decades" - hence the practice of indefinite detention without trial, or indefinite suspension of a civil case - is not legally sound (Gitmo ahem). On the other hand, science has little to say about moral decisions, it simply reports on factual matters. For example, cannibalism is abhored by the legal system but as long as you don't consume the brains & nervous tissue (prion diseases etc.), and cook it thoroughly, flesh is basically flesh, say the scientists. Hence it can be rather unwise to let scientists make moral decisions (John von Neumann wanting to surprise-nuke the Soviet Union and slaughter a hundred million people is a notable example, as is Mengele's interest in acquiring human subjects for medical experimentation), and equally unwise to let lawyers make decisions about scientific issues such as the role of fossil fuels in global warming, or the safety and efficacy of vaccines (politicians who were shady lawyers in their past lives controlling the budgets of federal science-funding agencies comes to mind as a negative example). The practice of science and law is, in contrast to the theoretical ideal, woefully corrupt, biased and untrustworthy in our modern world. Finding a lawyer or scientist capable of explaining complex topics in their domain without trying to manipulate things for their own personal benefit is a fairly difficult process, much like sifting dirt to find gems. The fact is, science and law requires intelligent individuals, but intelligence without any self-consistent moral code easily leads to the clever self-serving manipulator and con artist types. Any business or government entity that needs to hire scientists and lawyers to make progress has their work cut out for them, that's for sure - assuming they want accurate reports, and aren't just trying to get 'reputable experts' on board who will tell the public that toxic waste is good for your health, or to find shady lawyers who will help hide the profits in offshore tax havens.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  >much less scientific than macroeconomics or inflation management That bad, eh?
• knighthack 4y ago
  As a lawyer, this is one of the most insightful posts on the practice of law - in so few words - I've ever seen. Bravo.
• darkerside 4y ago
  > Because on one hand, the judge believes himself to be bound by conventions and norms, the gravitational force of precedents, and the judge’s internal sense of what ought to be the result. On the other hand, these forces battle against various social forces and structural realities that are far more real than the canons about how you read statutes. Every judgment is the outcome of such a conflict. Fascinating and excellent point, but I think I'd suggest one nuance to this interpretation. It works this way everywhere, but perhaps in India, the rule of law is in direct conflict with social norms, whereas other countries with rule of law have managed to align law with social convention to avoid this problem. Imagine a judge interpreting a law that, for example, clearly assigns the death penalty to a child.
• t_mann 4y ago
  > Law is an impressionistic business, much less scientific than macroeconomics or inflation management Not sure if this is an intended jab at economists or just an ironic misconception. Macroeconomics is arguably the academic discipline with the worst track record in terms of prediction, and inflation is the biggest mystery within there. I remember in 2014, then ECB president Mario Draghi was asked whether stimulus measures he had just announced wouldn't lead to inflation. His response (paraphrased from memory) - "Where is the inflation? We know it might come, but we don't see it. We see an immediate crisis, so we take are taking these measures to deal with that, once we see inflation we'll deal with that."
  • civilized 4y ago
    If it's not a jab at macro it's the most insane thing I've ever read. Macro has a couple successes but, whenever I have contact with it, it mostly seems to be a collection of competing, politically-flavored voodoo ideologies with no clear way to decide which if any is illuminating.
  • sib 4y ago
    As one of my advisors in college (very senior, tenured macroeconomic professor, who had been on a US President's board of economic advisors) said to me, "If you lined all the economists in the world up end-to-end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion!"
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    I don't see how saying "my professional (law) is worse than that other profession (macroeconomics)" is a jab. A jab would be the other way around: "the only thing worse than my profession is that other profession".
    • t_mann 4y ago
      Praising a profession that is notorious for its lack of a specific trait for having exactly that trait, while there are be countless other examples that would come to mind more readily, can indeed be a subtle jab.
• CapitalistCartr 4y ago
  I spent five years and multiple lawyers, until I found a good one, fighting my mortgage company, trying to get my day in court. In the end, I never did, and mostly lost. That's the power of a corporate legal team.
• memcg 4y ago
  I recently looked up a lawyer that I used a decade ago. Seems he was convicted of a federal crime and disbarred. He is now a judge.
• jwsteigerwalt 4y ago
  From a consultative standpoint, a good lawyer is can be a reflection of being a good client. The same applies to business departments working with corporate counsel. Keeping questions and asks objective leads to objective response.
• johndhi 4y ago
  In my experience as a lawyer at tech companies: -bad lawyers creative an antagonist relationship with their internal colleagues in sales and contribute to distrust -good lawyers spend a lot of time learning stuff about their clients (engineering, corp dev, sales, whoever) that seems "tangential" to the fundamental legal issues at first blush -bad lawyers think they know the answer to legal questions facing the company -good lawyers believe no one knows the answers but by combining their knowledge with that of their clients they can arrive at optimal answers
• AcerbicZero 4y ago
  Judges should not be lawyers by trade; It creates an insidious incentive structure to make "law" into something far different from what we actually want.
• lamontcg 4y ago
  One skill of lawyers is that they understand the context of words and their meaning in the judicial system. I often see untrained people making arguments on reddit about the law where they're picking apart words into the meaning they want to have them and constructing a legal parallel universe where the law means what they hope it means. And they can point at dictionary definitions for each word to back up their interpretation. And its not that they don't consider something like case law, instead, they just don't even understand that it exists. Often times when there's two parallel readings which are theoretically possible one of them winds up with implications which are clearly absurd and a real-life flesh and bone judge will outright reject the attempt to twist the meaning of words and phrases. Every now and then a judge somewhere does let this kind of argument through and it makes headlines, but usually those kinds of cases are going to be overturned on appeal. A lot of the legal system is that everyone over time has agreed that words strung together in a particular way has a particular interpretation that applies. If you go in trying to fight that interpretation you usually always lose. An attempt to buffer overflow the legal system based on dual meanings will usually wind up with a judge disagreeing with your nonsense.
  • drc500free 4y ago
    Great points. I've also noticed that tech people can struggle to accept that the legal system has different outcomes depending on a person's intent, and methods for determining what that intent was. There are many ways that interpreting law isn't the same as executing code, but that's the one I run into over and over. A judge isn't a CPU, and neither is a jury. They can differentiate superficially similar actions.