Law = science

Posted Jun 28, 2003 1:04 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: My Visit to SCO (Linux Journal) by bkw1a
Parent article: My Visit to SCO (Linux Journal)

As a lawyer and scientist, I find law quite scientific. The problem with law is just that it is way too complex. The rules are there as surely as Newton's, but there are an incredible number of them. That makes legal decisions seem quite arbitrary to non-lawyers, especially when they are reported in snippets in the mainstream news.

The reason law is so complex is precisely because of the current trend toward individual justice -- doing the right thing in every individual case. It wasn't always that way. Until the early part of the 20th century, the rules were simple and few. Accordingly, there were lots of individual cases of people getting screwed. The rule that gave the greatest good to the greatest number gave unreasonable results in individual cases.

An example of this is the hearsay rule of evidence. Used to be, you just couldn't use hearsay evidence. Period. That meant on average you got better evidence in court, but sometimes good, verdict-changing evidence got excluded. Now the hearsay rule goes on for pages. Exceptions run into the dozens, different in every jurisdiction.

Another example is contract liability. In the old days, you were nearly always bound by what you signed. The law assumed the fiction that if you signed a contract, you understood the deal and agreed to it. Naturally, people got screwed right and left. But at least cases were always predictable. Today, you must study for years to know just when a signature is binding. Cases go to trial 10 times as often as they used to, and when they do, the legal talent to try them costs a lot more.

The first people to witness subatomic particles zipping around defying the laws of physics must have thought physics wasn't very scientific either. Eventually, they figured out the myriad refinements of Newton's laws that showed it really is scientific. Law is the same way.