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From: sts@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stanley T Shebs)
Newsgroups: net.legal
Subject: The usefulness of lawyers
Message-ID: <463@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Aug-83 17:55:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.463
Posted: Tue Aug 23 17:55:52 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Aug-83 00:50:33 EDT
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
Lines: 25

The people arguing in favor of lawyers have a point.  The law is complex,
and there's no lack of people trying to break it in various subtle ways.
Let's beat the programming analogy to death.  There's at least two
ways to improve an existing program; modify it or rewrite it.  We all
know what happens to programs that have been modified too many times -
they begin to resemble the IRS tax code, and that's not just my analogy.
Rewriting is often the trick to improving a computer program.  So how
many laws get rewritten to make them simpler and clearer?  So far as I
know, the answer is *none*.  They just grow and grow, legal hack upon
amendment, case upon appeal.

Now why is that?  I believe that there is a difference of personal ethic
between lawyers and engineers (of course, this is an overgeneralization).
Engineers are trained to think in terms of improving efficiency, making
things work better, etc etc.  Presumably lawyers are supposed to be
trained to think in terms of justice, but that's harder to evaluate than
40% efficiency increase, so we get an adversary system where the most
important thing is to *win* against someone else.  Winning your case
is the determinant of justice.  Imagine a situation in which an engineer's
40% speed increase caused some other engineer's project to slow down
by the same amount!  It's hard to see how justice can really be served
in such a system, but I don't have a replacement - yet.

				stan the leprechaun hack
				ssc-vax!sts (soon utah-cs)