[ih] legal models [was: there must be a corollary to Godwin's law about Sec 230, was ARPANET pioneer]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 07-Mar-22 23:10, Dr Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history wrote:
> My impression/experience is quite the opposite, lawyers are usually very
> clever people (they make a living using the word as a weapon so to
> speak, and can read themselves into complex issues amazingly quickly) but
> of course ambulance chasers might find that difficult.

I would agree with that in general, but we have seen cases in which
lawyers have clearly failed to understand technical issues.

I would extend your comment to also cover fraud squad ("brigade financière")
police officers, who quite often have legal training. In the early days
of cybercrime they were the only police who could understand the topic,
or even what the Internet was.

Anecdote: Sometime in the late 1980s, we hosted a meeting at CERN between
two officers from the "brigade financière" in Paris, an officer from
the Geneva "brigade financière", and an officer from a German service
that I remember she described as the "Informatikpolizei", although that
may not have been the official title. In any case I had to give them a
short lecture about what a modem was, the concepts of dial-up and remote
login, and exactly how a bad person could use a DECnet host at CERN to
hop from a stolen login in Germany via Switzerland to a target host in
France.

I have to say that the fraud squad officers understood this very quickly,
although it was completely new to them.

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

> 
> In Common Law countries judges are selected from experienced lawyers, ie
> it's further, positive selection. But, they only adjudicate the
> issue(s) before them ("on the papers") as narrowly as possible.
> 
> So you get what you pay for.
> 
> 
> In Germany the grade of your law school exam and the one after the two
> year internship (akin to the Bar Exam) are the determining factor of
> becoming a (junior) judge and then progress to higher courts.  These
> courts adjudge a little wider and if there is complex matter the courts
> will hear both sides experts and perhaps even appoint one.
> 
> 
> Many judgements I have read (US, UK, ZA, NA and DE) to a reasonable to
> good job of framing the jargon into plain English/German.
> 
> el
> 
> On 2022-03-07 03:26 , Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> [...]
>> 2) You cannot assume that advocates and judges understand the
>> technology well enough to argue and adjudicate correctly. There's
>> been a persistent failure to distinguish value from reference, for
>> example, not helped by lousy terminology such as "address" when
>> a URL is meant (even without starting on the distinction between
>> URL, URN and URI).
> [...]
>