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

[ned+internet-history at mrochek.com]

> 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've found corporate patent counsel to be very very good -  as in able to catch
my techinical errors good. Quite a few have an engineering background.

And the appellate bench tends to even better.

Beyond that... I've done a lot of depositions, and in that regard my experience
has been poor. Perhaps the worst was when I was deposed in a case where not
only did the plantiff's lawwer not understand any of the fairly low level tech
involved, he didn't care. He spent a lot of time about the poor preparation of
this own materials by his team and how he was going to get a bunch of people
fired because of it.

Most of his questions made no sense. But you still have to answer, so I
eventually stumbled into the approach of letting him ask the question, wait for
all the other lawyers to finish objecting (there were multiple parties involved
in this fiasco), then saying something along the lines of, "Your question makes
no sense, the closest question I can think of is <blah>, the answer to that
question is <blah>."

This went on for about six hours, at which point one of the other lawyers
completely lost it and started screaming at the guy.

There much more to it, but the rest gets into privileged material. Suffice to
say it was complete shitshow that went on for weeks.

> 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.

In this Common Law state judges are elected by the public, leading to such
amusements as a baker (with no legal credentials) recently getting elected to -
superior court, I think - in Santa Monica.

The bigger problem is you end up with a lot of former prosecutors as judges.
Very low tech savvy overall, to say nothing of the obvious biases.

> So you get what you pay for.

Or not. In a recent local case I'm familiar with a lawyer with an good
reputation basically stopping showing up to court dates. Seems he developed
some medical condition and tried to hide it rather than withdraw.

The winners were delighted about the win and thought it was all over. Wrong.
The loser decided to appeal, usually a waste of time but not in cases of
flagrant malpractice. And as I said, appellate lawyers tend to be very good at
what they do. Not only did the appellate brief void the verdict, it forced a
immediate settlement.

				Ned

P.S. If you have any interest in appellate law and the people who practive it,
I highly recommend:

     https://appellatesquawk.wordpress.com/

> 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).
> [...]
> --
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