[HN Gopher] Law for Computer Scientists (2020)
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Law for Computer Scientists (2020)
Author : jruohonen
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-01-28 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lawforcomputerscientists.pubpub.org)
| nkmnz wrote:
| What about the opposite? Computer Science for lawyers?
| jruohonen wrote:
| Plenty of that; much more than the other way around, in fact, I
| assert. In any case, a highly recommended monograph easily
| grasped also by computer scientists and their students. The
| only major limitation is that the book is eurocentric, but that
| is probably unavoidable already due to length limitations.
|
| EDIT: Get the whole copy (not everything seems to be on the
| website) from here:
|
| https://www.cohubicol.com/assets/uploads/law_for_computer_sc...
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| The typical lawyer knows more about computers and programming,
| than a typical programmer knows about the law.
|
| I think this is the case for most fields with respect to
| programming.
| torstenvl wrote:
| I am not so sure. Many of my day job colleagues struggle to
| use Excel, let alone code anything. By contrast there seem to
| be a lot of programmers who have a basic understanding of the
| law, at least as it applies to them.
| fragmede wrote:
| What type of law and what type of programming? Everyone has
| to be aware of computers these days, but that doesn't make
| them know anything about programming. Meanwhile, in between
| traffic laws, financial laws (taxes, particularly),
| employment law, invention patent laws, maybe real
| estate/permitting laws, a programmer and any person in
| society needs to have some knowledge of the law to exist more
| than a lawyer needs to know about programming.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Generally, what the average programmer "knows" about the
| law is the equivalent to what the average lawyer "knows"
| about programming: the superficial, easy stuff that you can
| pick up without any actual training or effort.
| scrozart wrote:
| What, exactly, are you basing this assumption on?
| 1propionyl wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. But I would say:
|
| The typical programmer thinks they know far more about the
| law, than a typical lawyer thinks they know about
| programming.
| genneth wrote:
| This is "law" from an European (EU) perspective. The foundations
| differ in English and US law. I've always thought it would be
| interesting to compare them in the same way computer scientists
| compare the design choices in different operating systems. At the
| top level the same outcomes are desirable, but the lower levels
| and choices of abstractions are different.
| t8sr wrote:
| I'm not sure why you feel the need to double-quote that. At any
| rate, the book seems to cover UK law, and in fact is published
| at Oxford?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're attracting downvotes for correctly
| stating that the way law works in the UK is very different
| than the way it works in continental Europe. The UK is a
| common law country, like the US, while many EU nations use
| civil law systems.
|
| The basic mechanisms of UK law are more similar to US law
| than to French law. The actual laws on the books are probably
| the other way around, though.
| johndhi wrote:
| It's really hard to compare them. Just like it's hard to
| compare one country to another. So many factors.
| johndhi wrote:
| The common way people think about common law versus civil law
| is this:
|
| -common law depends more on courts to make and refine legal
| decisions -civil law relies more on regulators.
|
| In civil law countries it's more common for the statutes
| (governing text) to be longer and go into great detail. In
| common law countries you see some extremely short laws - like
| the Sherman act in US Antitrust law is like 2 sentences long.
|
| That's the common understanding. These days though both EU
| and US are converging a bit in their approach.
| dblitt wrote:
| Does anyone know of any similar works that instead focus on a
| common law background (US/UK/others) vs civil law (EU/most of the
| world), that I am understanding this book focuses on?
|
| This is a topic I am very interested in, but since I am from the
| US I would prefer to start with law as practiced here.
|
| Edit: only skimmed and it seems this book may be both EU and UK
| focused. Seems to be funded by the EU European Research Council
| but published by Oxford?
| johndhi wrote:
| What are some of your basic questions about the legal system?
| Happy to take a shot at answering.
| johndhi wrote:
| I'm a lawyer that works in tech. Anybody got questions for me?
|
| I fine these primers almost always focus too much on
| technicalities and don't make the takeaways sufficiently obvious.
| godelski wrote:
| Why not write a blog then to fill in that gap?
| johndhi wrote:
| Been thinking about it, but our industry is a service
| industry and we prefer to get paid to offer our expertise. If
| I go out on my own and find myself lacking clients, I might.
| mo_42 wrote:
| When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS
| and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once
| or twice of switching.
|
| I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating
| system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code
| similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the
| conditions are fulfilled.
| Terr_ wrote:
| When you include common-law and look at the broader cycle, I'd
| argue the legal system is more like a JIT optimization rather
| than source code: We formalize and streamline lots of existing
| implicit social rules and shared expectations, things that
| exist-before and can operate-without any formal legal text...
| Just not as well.
|
| In other words, the relationship is more like recipes versus
| cooking. People cooked foods first-- possibly many many times--
| and then formalized them later with documentation and rules to
| help make an outcome transferable or fast.
|
| However, it would be a mistake to think that just because
| recipes are ubiquitous, they are a prerequisite for the
| process.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hehe, I felt this slightly a few times in the recent years.
|
| Economy is also a large scale self adjusting optimizer,
| logistical neural network ?
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