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What's the chance that the legal system would suddenly become coherent if we replaced all lawyers (and therefore judges) with mathematicians?
by smoyer 14y ago
What's the chance that the legal system would suddenly become coherent if we replaced all lawyers (and therefore judges) with mathematicians?
- muuh-gnu 14y agoLwayers are not the problem. The law makers and the law making and decision making process is the problem.
- jacques_chester 14y agoIn common law countries there are three main tributaries of law: legislation, the common law, and equity. Depending on where you are, the latter two are sometimes "fused" into a single type of law. "Law makers" -- I presume you mean legislators -- only control legislation. This is often called "positive law", in that somebody has to take positive action to "make" it where it didn't exist before. By convention, the common law is considered to be "discovered". It exists independent of men and women, and the role of judges is to determine what it is. In practice there is a dynamic tension between the evolution of the common law as it finds and adapts to new problems, and the intervention of the legislature when it decides that the law should be something else. Legislation itself quickly accretes case law that decides what the given piece of legislation means.
- Mvandenbergh 14y agoZero.
- jheriko 14y agoit might become consistent but at the cost of being complete... or the other way around. ;)
- jheriko 14y agoer... not being complete XD
- mich41 14y agoMathematicians are people who define probability as the measure of some well-defined subset of some well-defined set of all events. The people who use probability theory to build approximate models of real world events are called statisticians (and those who forget about "approximate" - applied statisticians).
- jacques_chester 14y agoThe law is highly coherent. But it deals with the largest and messiest possible problem domain: everything humans do.
- danso 14y agoWell, "everything humans do" includes creating the law, so by that definition, the law is highly incoherent. And a close reading of the law reveals this. In fact, it is often by close readings of the law (and precedent and every other historical quirk) on which controversial and contested decisions are rendered
- jacques_chester 14y ago> Well, "everything humans do" includes creating the law, so by that definition, the law is highly incoherent. Which meaning of incoherent are we taking here? > And a close reading of the law reveals this. Do go on.
- rayiner 14y ago90% of the work of a jury trial is managing human reactions to things. There are things that judges need to know about statistics. E.g. That in modern DNA forensics, lab error totally dominates the probability of a coincidental match, limiting accuracy to 1-2%. On the other hand, they must be deeply cognizant of human responses. A mathematician, told that some test shows a person 1,000 times more likely than average to be the killer, will intuitively realize that the person is still unlikely to be the killer. A jury of ordinary people won't. We have judges precisely to mediate between these two domains.