sts@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stanley T Shebs) (08/24/83)
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)
porges@inmet.UUCP (08/26/83)
#R:ssc-vax:-46300:inmet:16000001:000:516 inmet!porges Aug 25 18:15:00 1983 As regards why laws aren't just rewritten, "unlike programs"....for understandable reasons that also have computer analogues. Laws aren't really like programs, they are interfaces. If you change the interface, suddenly a whole lot of stuff will stop working. Similarly, if you change laws, people who used to happy with old laws will bitch about it. In other words, the IRS tax code may be changing in a horrobly complex but upward-compatible way, which is why it looks like OS/370. And then again, maybe not.