Real world is messy. Sharp definitions and unambiguous statements about anything are not possible. Everything is, in the end, politics. Our collective way of de

Real world is messy. Sharp definitions and unambiguous statements about anything are not possible. Everything is, in the end, politics. Our collective way of dealing with this is packaging all the complicated questions inside an abstraction called "the law" and letting people called "lawyers" deal with it. The lawyer's job is to keep the complexity hidden from other people and provide a clean user interface for interacting with untrusted entities (with trusted entities, like our families and friends, we tend not to rely on the law at all). However, like in software, abstractions leak, and often the inherent messiness of human relations that we tried to package into a nice lawyer interface becomes apparent to the end user. We like to blame the lawyers for this, and maybe sometimes they really should be blamed, but on a much deeper level, at least part of the blame should be on ourselves - not you or me personally, but rather us collectively - for insisting that inherently complex and messy matters should be made simple for us even when it's not possible.