Ada Lovelace, confidence and the Digital Economy Bill
At Women's Question Time last week the first question was about the lack of statues commemorating the achievements of women. The audience struggled to think of any. Boudicca, okay. Queen Victoria, yes, although the female figures around her representing abstract virtues don't really count. Queen Caroline. Florence Nightingale. Umm ... we ground to ( Read more... )
Should Cavell's be considered a 'military' statue? It's tricky.
Law is way more complicated and difficult than technology, and we all cheerfully opine about that.
YES, AND I WISH TO FUCK PEOPLE WOULDN'T!
Honestly, everyone's a lawyer on the internet. I've often toyed with writing a post about this: the amount of incorrect information and just plain bollocks spouted at impressionable people about 'the law' really chaps my hide. I haven't written the post because of a) time and b) an inability to communicate properly just how arrogant and infuriating I find this.
I think the idea that law is 'way more complicated and difficult than technology' is in fact part of the problem you point to, simply framed differently. People have different aptitudes. I, for example, think the difficulty of law is wildly exaggerated (partly in the interests of lawyers being able to continue being smug about all their years of study). There are a few really brain-hurting bits, but a surprising amount is really quite common-sensible. The difficulty with law is not the complexity but the sheer wealth of information, plus the problem of knowing how and what to research. The rest is a) administrative procedure and b) confidence, as far as I can tell. However, I know there are plenty of people who regard law as tremendously difficult, some with considerable experience, so I doubt my opinion counts as anything universally applicable.
How difficult a thing is seen to be is as socially coded as how valuable it is. I personally think knitting is waaaaay harder than taking a law exam, but I also think coding is probably 10 times as hard as knitting. But I can't count and I don't get these things. I fully approve of the celebration of Ada Lovelace and other women in technology for many reasons, but at least one has to be that decoupling expectations of gender from kinds of technically challenging achievement ought to be able to give us a clearer idea of what it actually involves, once we get past the idea that women's ickle brains can't cope. We long since got past the idea of class as hard restriction on ability ('Jude The Obscure' comes to mind), but there are still some cranks out there maintaining that women can't do maths. (I can't, but that's just anecdata!)
However: as a caveat, I think there's nothing wrong with people being cautious about the possibility of talking utter shit about things. I'm highly in favour of that. Unfortunately, to quote the unsurpassable Charlie Brooker; "One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people. " It seems that may not have been true of Queen Anne, though, who gives every impression of having been quite forthright and with good reason. Everyone's favourite fat alcoholic lesbian military commander? Maybe.
Reply
Where non-lawyers tend to fall down, in my experience, is either in thinking they've found the whole answer when they've actually only found part, or in trying to apply the principles they've discovered.
The first failure mode happens when people think they know what the law says, but actually they're missing something because they don't know where else to look. For instance, they may have found the ten-year limitation period in the Consumer Protection Act and not realise that there are other limitation periods in the Limitation Act that are also relevant to product liability, or they may see a contractual exclusion of liability and not realise that they also need to think about tort. A legal professional in each case wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of both sets of legal principles, but they would usually at least know they needed to look them up; the lawyer has known unknowns where the lay person has unknown unknowns. Again, this isn't about intrinsic difficulty.
The second failure mode is about interpreting the results of your research, and this is where I think it genuinely does become more intrinsically difficult. The most common mistake I see lay people making is over-literalism, so they think they've found some clever loophole, or often some impeccable chain of logic that proves the law is an ass, when actually a court would never interpret it that way. The most recent example of that I saw was the claim that an anti-gay marriage amendment in one of the US states had inadvertently made straight marriage illegal in that state - it hadn't, but the logic was very convincing to lay people looking just at the text of the amendment. This is partly to do with not being aware of the canons of construction, which gets us back to unknown unknowns, but it's also to do with judging how much weight to give to the different factors once you do know them all. To be good at that, you need not just legal insights, but also psychological, social and probably political ones in order to try and predict how a judge will resolve all the inevitable ambiguities. It gets easier with years of experience, but that alone makes it more difficult for lay people to approximate (and means that even people with law degrees may make wrong assumptions if they don't practise, or are relatively newly-qualified, or are trying to deal with something outside their specialism). But more than that, the ability to perform that kind of synthesis differs even between lawyers of broadly equal experience, and I think to be really, really good at it actually requires genius levels of intelligence - because the facility of instinctively synthesising insights from very different fields is basically what genius is, AFAICT, and that is what the absolute top barristers generally have. I think I'm quite good at it as solicitors go, but I'm not really, really good in that sense.
Reply
The thing I find most severely annoying is when people make claims which are either out-of-date or just plain wrong, and do so in situations where people genuinely need sound advice. For example, claims such as "you have to have been working for your employer for 2 years before you can make a claim for unfair dismissal". Or the claim that it was illegal to throw a dead animal into a waste bin. The first, which I've seen made several times, was correct a very long time ago, the second, well, I don't know where that came from. But in the instances I saw, the people concerned were genuinely freaked out/worried by receiving the incorrect advice, so they struck me as potentially quite damaging claims to make - for this reason, my position tends to be, "if you don't actually know, zip it!".
The issues of misinterpretation you give are very interesting, and are sort of at the next level up in error-making. Certainly, being legally qualified doesn't seem to prevent those instances cropping up - see that nutty American dude trying to claim that Women's Studies at universities are discriminatory, blah blah, who is apparently legally qualified. I would suggest that at least some of these instances are more than a little wilful, though. Generally, I find these quite frustrating but perhaps more forgiveable, depending on the particulars.
Complete agreement with your first paragraph. I am highly suspicious about the supposed 'difficulty' of law, and I think it suits a lot of people in the legal profession to insist that it's all terribly difficult, when, as you say, what's most difficult/privileged is finding the time and mental space to absorb all the basics. It's always been one of my long-held beliefs that the average person does not ned to be a genius to understand basic legal principles, and helping people have a firmer idea of what their rights and responsibilities are is a really important aspect of social justice work. Still, indeed, application of principles is often the tricky bit and that *is* improved with practice, but I see no reason why non-lawyers automatically can't do those things.
There are always a few geniuses in every field, but it's unrealistic to expect everyone in the field to be like that. FWIW, I was a bit disappointed with our counsel's performance at trial recently - I just didn't think he was thorough enough, careful enough about the minor details (eg people's names) or firm enough about putting his questions. And he presumably earns several times what I do! So, y'know, everyone's a critic ;-)
Reply
Leave a comment