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Comment by retrocryptid | Hacker News Reader

both my father and a dear friend gave me some great advice... "if you can, go to law school. even if you're not a practicing lawyer, it's very useful to know how they think."

one friend commented "law school teaches you about the operating system of society"

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I don't understand how this is great advice. You might as well say: if you can, go to med school so that when you have to deal with the medical establishment, you know how it works. Spend years as a carpenters apprentice so when you buy a house you will be able to recognize the quality/problems it has. etc

It’s because (according to this thinking), a legal background combines well with almost anything else you end up doing as long as terms, contracts, long documents and regulations are unavoidable. Other fields are also useful, and the rigor from studying, e.g., medicine, may be useful for the discipline it instills, but aren’t as ubiquitous and scary to laypersons as law.

It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity.

> It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity.

An alternative hypothesis based on people I know - traditionally, smart/middle-to-high class people pick between medicine, law, and finance, with law school being the default. Then many of these people realize they don't like practicing law so they transition into something else.

That’s reasonable. I think law’s especially well suited to that, too, because the lawyer job market is in tatters compared to medicine right now (no idea about finance.) The comparative advantage of using the degree to complement another field can be worth more than actually practicing.

I've been reading "Lectures on Jurisprudence", a collation of lecture notes from a course Adam Smith gave in the 1760s. It is somewhat puzzling phrasing but seems to be a very structured introduction to the law, addressing questions like:

* What are the ways recognised by the law in which people acquire property? One way is simply by holding it for a long time; another is by receiving it, as through an inheritance; a third is when property results from other property, as when an apple tree produces apples.

* What do "rights" mean in a legal context and where do they originate from? Some are intrinsic, some are the result of agreements.

* What are the laws of marriage and inheritance and how have they changed over time?

I would agree. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg these days to go...

I'm surprised there isn't a Khan Academy style online class for learning aspects of American law.

There are online degree programs which are accepted by some state bar associations.

ooh, gonna find that out later.

Barbri isn't free, but it's much cheaper than law school. You don't need school to learn the law, you just need to borrow and buy some books.

It depends on the country. I'm assuming you're from the US, but (law) education in Europe is generally much more affordable.

Yup, here (Belgium) it costs the same as anything else. :)

You don't have to go to law school. Just take a commercial law course in a college.

I’d go just to learn the latin

Would definitely fill in the pieces from some of my own study of law

A couple undergraduate classics courses would be far cheaper and much more useful in that regard. On a similar note, studying Greek and Latin in college gave me a large leg up in other areas of study (e.g. I had a much greater mastery of English and writing, programming language syntax was far easier to learn, etc.). Classical languages are far more useful than people realize.

How's Greek and Latin related to programming language syntax?

I studied Latin and to me it’s the syntax that’s interesting and useful for this career. Subject-object-verb structure, and the words change depending on their usage (declension/conjugation). Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill

"Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill"

... yeah no those are nothing alike at all...

Debugging, then. I don’t know. Your mileage may vary.

Key ideas in computer science, such as for instance Chomsky grammars, are derived directly from linguistics.

I don't think it's fair to say that approaching a foreign language has nothing to do with approaching a new programming language.

Let's suppose I buy into this idea. Is studying German or other modern language any less useful?

I don’t think so. It’s not about the particular language, just studying the structure and figuring out the rules. It’s good practice. Latin is interesting because it’s a root for so many languages and in particular English

For me it would be less useful due to the similarity(e.g. I had little to no difficulty learning Spanish as a native English speaker. Sure, there were differences, but the similarities allowed me to focus on and pick up the difference more quickly without being overwhelmed). It would be like going from Java to C#. Some differences, but very few because the base is so similar.

I should have specified it was learning Koine Greek that helped (Latin was somewhat of a bridge that made it less painful, because Latin also relies heavily on declension/conjugation instead of straight word order). Koine Greek is wildly different than English. I think it would be the difference between something like going from an OOP language to something like Prolog.

OK but you can do all that in your native language also. It's called grammar and rhetoric, part of the language arts, taught in schools worldwide.

Sure you can. You can add flavour with other languages, too. For example, I only really learned about the subjunctive mood after learning it in French, which uses it much more distinctly than in English.

Indirect relation. It forced me to think differently about language and syntax in general. For example, English (and many other languages) relies on a word order typology. Greek relies on inflection and declension over word order, which is wildly different.

Between taking a term in statistics/law 101/ and learning Greek I would always go for the first group.

I am trilingual, but I have never found anything in natural languages to be useful for programming (well, apart from knowing English because most of the software is written in it). Moreover - learning syntax of a programming language is the easiest part.

The hardest part for natural languages are your vocab/familiarity with the culture, and the hardest part of programming languages is your familiarity with the ecosystem/libraries.

Same, trilingual as well.

There have been studies that show children with a bilingual upbringing tend to score higher in school.

So it might indirectly help with programming, or at least help with learning to program.

I took a latin class in uni.

I think it did help a bit because it made me think about the syntactic structure intellectually, where my native tounge the syntax comes intuitively.

Not saying it magically made me a super programmer or anything, but i feel like it certainly didnt hurt my programming skill.

It's so annoying when they use latin for the sake of latin. My brain automatically translates "inter alia" to "among other things", but why not just say "among other things"?

I get it if there just isn't an English equivalent for a phrase, but when there is, and it fits 100%, it should be unacceptable to use anything else.

Maybe most commonly used language patterns can carry other connotations therefore bring in ambiguities. Bringing in special terms that are not otherwise used would reduce arguments over the usage. But in all likelihood it is probably just tradition, and a barrier of entry that insiders are happy to maintain.

Operating systems are suppose to assist the user. In this and most cases the law is a system of oppression. 16 years is a travesty. Economics and science are the true operating systems of society.

You go to law school to learn security exploits.

Using security exploits is non-coercive. Law is coercive.

You go to law school to learn how people convince other people to force other people to do things.

Why people follow law is not part of what you learn in law school. That is an anthropological phenomenon that has to do with culture, society and biology.

What you learn in law school is less fundamental and more specific to the system at hand. You learn contracts, property, criminal law, constitutional law, legal methods, civil procerude... torts...

You learn the specifics so that the system can be exploited.

If you think people who study law have some deep insight on the true nature of civilizations and the rules that humans operate under you are completely wrong.

Questions like which system is better? Communism or capitalism? Dictatorship or Democracy? Are not what you study in law school.

Remember law school is about security exploits.

I think you have not studied law.

Putting aside the question of what they do and don't teach in law school - over in my part of the world, where, as is normal in the British Commonwealth, law is normally studied at an undergraduate level, it's fairly standard for law students to double major in the humanities or social sciences, where those questions do indeed get asked from a non-legal and more anthropological and cultural perspective.

Well double majoring is different right? I'm sure if someone wanted to double major in physics and law they wouldn't be getting the social science part.

Man made laws are indeed oppression. They are an attack on the individual.

…but security researchers go to school to learn exactly that?

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