4 ms·

This is what happened to lawyers when everyone learned how to read. Then commenced a long evolution of the profession where practitioners did their best to make

This is what happened to lawyers when everyone learned how to read. Then commenced a long evolution of the profession where practitioners did their best to make the law more obscure and to invent as many dirty tricks as possible in order to pull the ladder up and sustain law as a profession through other means of exclusivity than the old education moat.

toss1 4y ago
What a load of absolute nonsense. I have personally coded a system for legal billing, had a variety of direct dealings with the legal system (contracts, etc.), and I live in a household with an attny at a top firm. I've been surprised by a good number of counter-intuitive things in the law, such that the general rule I've heard repeatedly is that we cannot reason about the law without actually looking at the code in that particular instance — go look it up. This strongly resembles software code - we can assume a bunch of things about how something works, but to really find out, we must read the source code or trace it — go look it up. Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. Every single unexpected or counterintuitive thing I've found, once I dig into it, is actually makes sense in terms of history, e.g., this seemingly odd rule of civil procedure is in place to prevent [bad_stuff] from happening which happened before, and from nearly 250 years of law in the US and 450 in some states, some serious cruft has accumulated, and could use some updating. This is NOT to say that some laws aren't unreasonable, and to that we need to look to politics, not some "trickery to maintain legal pay". I should also point out that the legal profession has not artificially limited the supply of lawyers as the medical profession has done by limiting accreditation of professionals. The result is that there are huge numbers of law school graduates, who even pass the bar exam, who literally cannot make a living as lawyers, and being offered $20/hour (literally) to work in some suburban law office with the hiring attny acting like it's a great offer. And watching from up close and inside it, the idea that 'just because you can read means that you should be able to practice law', is utter nonsense. This has NOTHING to do with any kind of alleged "dirty tricks", and EVERYTHING to do with the inherent complexity that arises from the situation. Just because you can write a "Hello World" app in your favorite language does not mean that you can design and build an ACID-compliant accounting system & database, or even know that concurrency issues exist and what to do about them. So, the actual facts on the ground are that attnys have not done the kind of exclusivity and dirty tricks that you cite, and in any case, they haven't managed to keep the wages in their profession high. So just because you have an attitude, does not mean that it is justified. Stop spouting nonsense.
- public_defender 4y ago
  Ugh. It's so discouraging when my lived experience contradicts with the subjective observation of someone who knows a lawyer and therefore becomes nonsense. I do want to point out that the "dirty tricks" methodology is in full effect, but has been wholly ineffective at e.g. keeping lawyer salaries and employability high. Just because it failed to deliver on those axes doesn't mean it's not happening. > Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. I'm not really motivated by this interaction to provide examples, but I assure you they are myriad. What I find particularly interesting about this comment is the assertion that the law makes sense if you just read it. This is both technically correct and practically useless. It illustrates that the intellectual moat which sustained law as a historically elite trade has evaporated. > Just because you can write a "Hello World" app... I hope that the difference between hello world and the other thing is that the developer has skill which adds value to the product. That's frequently not the case with lawyers. A lot of the time the increase in skill doesn't correlate to added value for anyone but the lawyer. It's a profession where people are largely rewarded for selfishly sequestering value rather than creating a better product/service or efficiently collaborating. tldr; I hope that the code boot camps AND the law schools go out of business, but that your field can avoid the needless arcane complexity to which mine has long ago capitulated.
  - toss1 4y ago
    OK, you've been much more deeply in it than I have. I used to have a similar attitude — that I ought to be able to quickly read a law in plain language and know what to do. Yet every time I argued that, I lost to valid often historical explanations from the attnys I was working/living with (& I've lived w/one for decades & been involve in a complex case with lots of BS maneuvering for 7+ years, and worked w/many building software for them). No one doubts that there is a LOT of needless arcane complexity. It is obvious to me that law is a monstrous mountain of arcane cruft. And not only the law, but also the caselaw precedents, regulations, etc.. It's also clear that this 1) has a strong exclusionary effect and 2) that those in the profession have little motivation to reduce this exclusionary effect, and some motivation to retain it, and so don't. But there is a difference between a system that has a tendency towards a result that no one fixes, and a conspiracy to create similar results. So, I'd really like to hear a good example or two that was deliberately created to exclude. Because AFAICT, it's just a mess that nobody is doing anything about and acting like it is some particular person's fault is self-destructive.

toss1 4y ago

What a load of absolute nonsense. I have personally coded a system for legal billing, had a variety of direct dealings with the legal system (contracts, etc.), and I live in a household with an attny at a top firm. I've been surprised by a good number of counter-intuitive things in the law, such that the general rule I've heard repeatedly is that we cannot reason about the law without actually looking at the code in that particular instance — go look it up. This strongly resembles software code - we can assume a bunch of things about how something works, but to really find out, we must read the source code or trace it — go look it up. Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. Every single unexpected or counterintuitive thing I've found, once I dig into it, is actually makes sense in terms of history, e.g., this seemingly odd rule of civil procedure is in place to prevent [bad_stuff] from happening which happened before, and from nearly 250 years of law in the US and 450 in some states, some serious cruft has accumulated, and could use some updating. This is NOT to say that some laws aren't unreasonable, and to that we need to look to politics, not some "trickery to maintain legal pay". I should also point out that the legal profession has not artificially limited the supply of lawyers as the medical profession has done by limiting accreditation of professionals. The result is that there are huge numbers of law school graduates, who even pass the bar exam, who literally cannot make a living as lawyers, and being offered $20/hour (literally) to work in some suburban law office with the hiring attny acting like it's a great offer. And watching from up close and inside it, the idea that 'just because you can read means that you should be able to practice law', is utter nonsense. This has NOTHING to do with any kind of alleged "dirty tricks", and EVERYTHING to do with the inherent complexity that arises from the situation. Just because you can write a "Hello World" app in your favorite language does not mean that you can design and build an ACID-compliant accounting system & database, or even know that concurrency issues exist and what to do about them. So, the actual facts on the ground are that attnys have not done the kind of exclusivity and dirty tricks that you cite, and in any case, they haven't managed to keep the wages in their profession high. So just because you have an attitude, does not mean that it is justified. Stop spouting nonsense.

public_defender 4y ago
Ugh. It's so discouraging when my lived experience contradicts with the subjective observation of someone who knows a lawyer and therefore becomes nonsense. I do want to point out that the "dirty tricks" methodology is in full effect, but has been wholly ineffective at e.g. keeping lawyer salaries and employability high. Just because it failed to deliver on those axes doesn't mean it's not happening. > Yet I have not found or even heard of a single instance of anything that would remotely qualify as the kind of "dirty tricks" or "exclusivity" you cite. I'm not really motivated by this interaction to provide examples, but I assure you they are myriad. What I find particularly interesting about this comment is the assertion that the law makes sense if you just read it. This is both technically correct and practically useless. It illustrates that the intellectual moat which sustained law as a historically elite trade has evaporated. > Just because you can write a "Hello World" app... I hope that the difference between hello world and the other thing is that the developer has skill which adds value to the product. That's frequently not the case with lawyers. A lot of the time the increase in skill doesn't correlate to added value for anyone but the lawyer. It's a profession where people are largely rewarded for selfishly sequestering value rather than creating a better product/service or efficiently collaborating. tldr; I hope that the code boot camps AND the law schools go out of business, but that your field can avoid the needless arcane complexity to which mine has long ago capitulated.
- toss1 4y ago
  OK, you've been much more deeply in it than I have. I used to have a similar attitude — that I ought to be able to quickly read a law in plain language and know what to do. Yet every time I argued that, I lost to valid often historical explanations from the attnys I was working/living with (& I've lived w/one for decades & been involve in a complex case with lots of BS maneuvering for 7+ years, and worked w/many building software for them). No one doubts that there is a LOT of needless arcane complexity. It is obvious to me that law is a monstrous mountain of arcane cruft. And not only the law, but also the caselaw precedents, regulations, etc.. It's also clear that this 1) has a strong exclusionary effect and 2) that those in the profession have little motivation to reduce this exclusionary effect, and some motivation to retain it, and so don't. But there is a difference between a system that has a tendency towards a result that no one fixes, and a conspiracy to create similar results. So, I'd really like to hear a good example or two that was deliberately created to exclude. Because AFAICT, it's just a mess that nobody is doing anything about and acting like it is some particular person's fault is self-destructive.