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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law.

Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge disconnect between what people understand their rights and legal positions to be, and what the lawyers can turn it into.

There's other problems as well. At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This leads to all sorts of problems with who gets justice.

Then there's the money. If we're all equal before the law, how can there be lawyers who cost thousands an hour? Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer, in which case they are just good marketers. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but if we cared that everyone had equal access, why wouldn't there simply be a big bench of lawyers from which you get assigned one? The legal system has somehow managed to both be a social good and a tremendous source of profit for its members. (Well, some of its members, they don't all make piles of cash.)

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> or they're just as good as any other lawyer

My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ticket.

She got me off; I was speeding, but I had been charged under the wrong section of the Road Traffic Act. "I humbly submit, your honour, that it would be quite wrong, your honour, for my client to be convicted of an offence he didn't commit, your honour".

Where you charged for speeding afterwards?

No, she got me off. I was acquitted.

The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort.

Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.

> Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.

relevance?

Not saying that mentioning it that way is relevant here, but I'd wager that being good looking is an asset for a lawyer in court.

Only that I had a lucky day in more ways than one.

Isn’t this a great example of what the OP was talking about? You did not get off because of absolute innocence, but “technical minutiae as if they are source code”.

But it does answer the OPs question, some are better at navigating it.

I don't think it's "technical minutiae"; I was charged with an offence that I didn't commit. My advocate just took the trouble to read the Act that I was charged under. Given that the court knew I hadn't committed the offence I was charged with, it would certainly have been a miscarriage of justice to go on and convict me anyway, and I could have got it overturned on appeal.

Oh I agree, but the law was confusing enough that an official bungled the charges.

This is way more common than people realize, and one of the reasons courts accept "no contest" and pleas so often, especially in things like traffic laws.

You said you were speeding, right? But somehow the judge can't just say "ah right, looks like it's the wrong traffic statute that's been filed. Here's a fine for whatever it was that you actually did, you can just settle it here or we do a proper trial if you disagree".

I mean of course we don't want people to be convicted of things they didn't do, but how is it ok for someone to get away with something they did do, just because some bureaucrat picked the wrong law?

> somehow the judge can't just say "ah right, looks like it's the wrong traffic statute that's been filed. Here's a fine for whatever it was that you actually did

We shatter the powers to bring and adjudicate charges. This creates inefficiencies, like this. But it also brings stability. (More practically, the judge may not have all the facts and circumstances relevant for citing the person.)

Due to historical procedural abuses, modern societies insist that due process is as high a bar to prosecution as guilt of the offense for which a defendant is charged. The courts don’t want to be used as a forum for detective work, either. They just want to hear the case as presented, issue a judgment, and move on to the next case.

I don't think judges should be able to go off-piste like that. In this country, charges are laid by the CPS, and adjudicated by courts, and not vice-versa. In the US, I believe (based on TV courtroom dramas!) that judges have more latitude.

In fact my "judge" was a panel of lay magistrates. They must consult the Clerk of the Court (a trained lawyer) if they have any doubt about their decisions.

I like this system; I'm not keen on the idea of a judge being able to change the charges on me at trial. I think the prosecution were given the opportunity to go away and get the charge altered; but they gave up (it was 30 years ago, memory falters).

Look, I deserved to be penalised; I would have simply put my hands up, but I had to go to court to make a mitigation plea, because I risked losing my licence.

My point was just that a really good advocate is head-and-shoulders above the crowd.

Prosecutors make this kind of mistake on a routine basis.

> At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity

Yeah, that's a political decision; the government is so anti-public service that it's cut it to disastrous levels.

In many cases the cuts to legal aid are politically targeted at situations where the government was losing too many cases.

Political/funding decisions are part of the mix, but I don't think the daylight between highly funded and underfunded amounts to fundamental difference.

Courts are extremely costly and/or low throughput. The vast majority of legal resolutions happen outside of courts, whether or not they even touch a court along the way.

It just is not designed for efficiency. Court systems are designed to embody legal ideals (and imo myths) of justice, that may be pretty far from common sense ideals.

We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare. This is the nature of the legal system, not a consequence of details like funding.

Courts don’t actually need to deal with vary many cases though. I suspect the average person needs to deal with the legal system for anything more complex than a speeding ticket less than once per decade.

And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.”

It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to resolve. The UK has ~700 homicide victims per year and significantly fewer murder trials. Individual trials can be long and expensive without it actually adding up to a significant expense.

So, looking at stats for England and Wales about 80% of homicide incidents result in one or more suspects being charged and a small number of those end up being acquitted (though it often takes some time for people to be charged). I guess that counts as significantly fewer, but wasn’t the impression I got from my initial reading of your post.

Yes; there are also a significant number of guilty pleas. They obviously vastly reduce trial time, though not the cost of investigation etc.

80% of incidents, but each incident can have multiple victims. 2020 for example had one unfortunate case of 39 people being found dead in a truck relating to human trafficking.

Anyway here’s Criminal court statistics up to 2019 that’s showing real downwards trends. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare.

This is a defeatist attitude, and one that allows bad actors to thrive. Landlord-Tenant law is a particularly relevant example here because most jurisdictions have substantial regulations that put substantial obligations and limitations on landlords -- far more than most other areas of contract law. However, many landlords can ignore these regulations because their tenants don't have access to courts to enforce them.

I would also argue that family law is an area that is a counter-example to your statement. In cases of divorce, especially with children involved, the courts are almost always involved, even when the parties come to an amicable separation agreement. You'll also note that the processes, personnel, and facilities of family court tend to be a lot more economical than a prototypical court of general jurisdiction. They stand as an example that if we want to make access to courts more widely available and economical, we can.

There's a fantastic piece in legal aid cuts in the LRB here, for anyone who's interested: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n11/francis-fitzgibbon/s...

It's obviously specific to the UK, but lots of the broader points are applicable anywhere (especially in the US, where the provisions whose loss he's writing about are provisions people have simply never had).

Arguably the most painful, cringe-inducing part is this one:

> The restrictions on legal aid are already leading to an increase in the number of people representing themselves in courts and tribunals. This has caused the Bar Council to publish A Guide to Representing Yourself in Court. It opens unpromisingly:

    >> The law can be very complicated. This guide explains things as clearly and as briefly as possible, but will only give you an overview of what you need to do if you have a civil law legal problem. This means we have had to miss bits out – bits that are likely to affect what the law would say about your own situation. So please do not rely on any of the examples used in this guide.

And also this very important observation:

> A civil case, let’s say something complex to do with a tenancy agreement, may well take twice as long in court with a self-represented litigant. The savings on lawyers’ already modest legal aid fees hardly count for much when the cost of running a single courtroom at the Old Bailey is estimated at £10,000 a day. [...] The conclusion must be that this legislation has nothing to do with saving money.

One of my least favorite trends: offices that give you pages of contract to agree to in order to just have a meeting on premises.

I got one of these in a job interview situation and it really was pages upon pages. I was in the lobby waiting for a job interview, and the person sent to fetch me was visibly pissed off I took the time to at least skim what the heck was in this agreement.

I mean what a messed up context. Obviously I won't get the interview unless I agree, and there's zero chance of negotiating any of these points. Should I just wave past it to placate the interviewers impatience? If I take my time to go through the details will they read me as a potential problem employee that will be legalistic about ordinary matters? If I don't take my time am I signaling that I'm a lax coworker that doesn't apply due diligence? If the interview goes well should I use the same behavior when evaluating the employment agreement? When signing the initial "get past the lobby" contract did I end up agreeing to something that could have implications for me later working at this location?

The whole thing is a kafkaesque farce.

I applaud Stevens for his stunt, even if only ultimately a symbolic protest.

It feels like reform in this area requires a generation of lawyers that become the top judges that are willing to oppose the mentality of most lawyers.

This one time I watched my COO say that he isn't signing the Facebook visitor NDA without getting a lawyer's approval on it first, and if they're not cool with that they can try to reschedule our meeting to happen outside the building. It worked, never signed.

> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff.

I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language.

For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.

On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.

Respectfully; No.

A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts.

I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year.

Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.

I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for.

That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.

House sales are complex enough that most people use common template contracts, simply because it makes the interaction with the required third parties (realtors, notaries, public record offices, lawyers, banks) more efficient by a large enough margin.

Rental however? Almost everyone uses their own crap contracts or some decades old template contract, and usually there is no one involved except the landlord and the renter. And because there is no need for more efficiency, the market can't and won't push for standard contracts.

I love Nova Scotia’s standard rental terms, with generous term for tenants:

> Use these forms to show the terms that must be part of any lease signed in Nova Scotia. The lease a landlord uses may look different, but must contain all the items shown here. If any of the items are not part of the lease a tenant signs, they apply anyway.

Either 2/3 or 3/3 of the apartments I've rented since graduating college have used a similar template to one another, where part of it comes down to checking boxes or filling in a blank space. They each had some variety of addendums, but shared a common core structure.

This was also at apartment complexes that had multiple units, so maybe it's different if you're renting from an individual for a one-off space.

Can’t you have auto-renewing clauses on your lease, with only small contractual updates every year on the points that effectively changed ?

That’s what I had on every appartment I rented. As you say it wouldn’t make sense to go through the building’s description every single year when nothing has changed.

Otherwise, an issue with having “standard” clauses, and only the differential in your contract, is your knowledge of the referenced standard at the time of the contract.

Imagine buying a house: I can’t imagine you’d be reviewing the standard house buying contracts every year just to be ready in case you buy one. So I’d assume you’d be reading the whole terms, from the standard + the differential at least once when you buy your first house. But then, if you sell and buy another one 5 years later, won’t you want to recheck the up to date standard terms, on top of the differential you sign for your specific contract ?

At the end of the day, I feel it would only benefit people who spend their lifes in the field and are aware of the standard terms at any given moments. I’d prefer to optimize for the people who are not familiar, and would have a harder time understand the whole of the contract.

In the UK it is to the landlord and their agent's benefit to repeatedly terminate your 12 months (minus 1 day) home lease, and have you sign a new one, with arrangement fees of course.

That's to make sure it is classed as a short term tenancy, less than 12 months, even if you live there for a decade.

Full legal tenancy rights don't kick in unless you have a lease longer than 12 months. As a result, I've never heard of anyone being offered such a lease.

Having an "auto-renewing clause" in an existing tenancy would defeat that benefit to the landlord. You'd better read the terms on the new lease each time, just in case something changed. But you can use your choice of "diff" tool; it's probably the same as the previous time, including typos.

(Commercial (business) leases are the opposite. Commercial landlords often want to offer only long leases (say 5 or more years), because that arrangement gives them strong rights to be paid for the entire term, no matter if the business wants to leave.)

I agree 100%. The "free-for-all contract law" based society in which, to get the most basic goods or services, everyone is forced to sign hundreds of contracts that they didn't have input in writing, can't possibly understand or even read, is completely unattainable.

All basic things of day-to-day life (jobs, rent, utilities, tickets, subscriptions) should be governed by mandated standard contracts (with some flexibility based on a series of optional clauses), so people just have to learn/understand a contract once and take that knowledge for the rest of their life. This way the actual paper contract a person signs should be just a single page, listing the parties, citing the standard contract, and a few bullet points citing the optionals. E.G. "I just rented a house, I signed Standard Rental Contract #3 with a no-pets and no-smoking clauses." - "Good for you, mine is the stricter Standard Rental Contract #2, and they also wanted to add the no-pets clause but I payed extra to remove that."

Anything outside this should only be considered a legal contract if each party involved had their own layer present when the contract was written and when it was signed (layer co-signing it with a legal duty to the client), having full input in writing the actual contract. If a company handles you one of their own contracts and asks you to sign without allowing you to change it, then it should not be valid/legal binding.

“ Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.”

In the US it typically is.

Re: the house, no, most people don’t sit and read it: https://themortgagereports.com/39671/home-closing-what-you-n... .

Even professional investors with millions of dollars of investments don’t appear to read or negotiate the documents until it looks like it might matter: https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/03/odd-lots-pod...

People just don’t care that much about legal documents until it looks like it will matter. People’s choice of individual contract provisions at most wage earning jobs, health care, rentals, or vacations is basically nil - they mostly don’t care to read it and so the writers of the contracts put in egregious terms.

Your links had me thinking for a while.

On themortgagereports, setting aside that the other camp from "the absolutists" is the former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is like, one man, who could also probably litigate his way out of any serious trouble, it still gets to the conclusion:

> The important point is that there is much that should be read in home closing materials. Whether you should read every word is arguable.

On professional investors, I wouldn't also hold them as the shinning beacon representing what most of us think or do with money, contracts or responsibilities.

I don't get the feeling that most people don't read, just that it's a deeply painful and frustrating experience that some people bail out from. Like tax reports, or homeworks. I still think most people are way too scare to not take the time to check as much as they can, for them these papers could affect the next 30 years of their life.

Also there's whole sections that can be skimmed pretty fast, but it's different to me than "not reading".

>Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer.

This is a problem with the nuance of law, not lawyers. The thing that finally clicked for me was talking with a lawyer at a electronics meetup. He was talking about some aspect of the law, and I realized that lawyers are just hackers. The system that they try to exploit is the law, rather than a computer.

Your money gets you a better hacker. The system is the same for everyone, but the interface is flexible.

It is frustrating. It's easy to villainize the producers and their lawyers. But on the other hand, it would be nice if consumers weren't so lazy and would instead stand up for themselves and fight back. But then that becomes hard if there isn't sufficient competition and choices in the market. At the end of the day, I think that the occurrence of consumers losing on actual lawsuits (much less even being involved in one) is sufficiently rare that it wouldn't justify the increased cost of goods if the risk were more balanced.

Part of a solution could be to require fine print and it's revisions to be posted online so it's easily accessible and up-to-date.

Once fine-print is published we could have a review sites (similar to fact checking sites) that could extract the essence from the fine print and point out major points, issues, etc.

Another, solution that would dis-incentivize 'kitchen-sink' contracts would be ability to invalidate whole contract if one of the clauses is found invalid.

You are massively over-simplifying the problem. Imagine someone put their contract online somewhere saying, "you must litigate in Miami-Dade County", what happens next? Is that lawful? Is it reasonable? Is it moral? You could easily have multiple legal professionals arguing about whether it is or isn't and at the end of the day, most people decide with their wallet anyway.

The reason we have Courts in many cases is to try and make decisions on grey areas in terms of what has already been decided elsewhere, you can't open-source that because even the judges won't agree.

I think it's a step in the right direction.

Single location where people can access fine print and it's revisions (fine print reserving the right to change at any time is such a BS) would make fine print more accessible (you can zoom in, print, etc, and service could monitor for changes and alert you to it.

Argument that one needs a lawyer to understand the contract highlights a problem with contracts. We all could use education and discussion about contract clauses and analyzing contract clauses online would be a perfect forum for that. It would also put pressure on contract writers and companies to make them more reasonable and clear.

Not sure if this works well enough, but tools like https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ could play a valuable role here and cause legalese to simplify along the way too.

Edit: another one https://pribot.org/polisis

> "even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law"

I think by far this is the biggest issue with EULAs and fine print: you really have no idea what anything means because it's all been crafted to cover legal concepts for which you have no prior knowledge.

Yes and: I'm fascinated by 5-4's critiques of law, the legal system (in the USA), law school, courts, and so forth. https://www.fivefourpod.com

IANAL. Emphatically. I just can't wrap my head around it all. I'm an outsider looking in, from a distance. But it seems important, like something I should know. So I've been reading books. Mostly stuff from the library. But I still don't feel any smarter about this stuff.

“Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex.”

That’s where diversity would help a lot. Congress should be more diverse in terms of background. Laws should be made by people with backgrounds in a variety of professions and not just lawyers and businesspeople as it’s in congress right now. It’s no surprise that they crank out laws that appeal to people with their backgrounds.

>At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity.

This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.

> This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.

Indeed. I really don’t want any tech bro to come and disrupt the legal framework, move fast and break things. It’s probably not the last thing I want, but quite close. I’d rather work under an imperfect legal system than be at the whim of another sociopathic arsehole.

What's likely to happen is we develop some sort of UCC-esque base contract that normalizes all the fine print boilerplate so that future contracts can just reference it in a manner to the tune of "these terms of service are like literally every other terms of service you agree to but with the following exceptions/specifications".

I thought the same thing but ultimately, many organisations want loads of exceptions to the standards for whatever reason. My wife is a Solicitor and when I proposed this, she laughed. There are already standard legal forms in the UK for many things but it never works out like that.

Even if the general intention is to use standard contracts, each company will have its own concerns: "Our ships are cheaper but a little older, we should reduce the amount of liability accordingly", "We use cheaper off-shore staff so we need to add clauses around languages etc." All of these add up to the mess that we end up with in the Ts and Cs.

> Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex.

Yeah, there outta be a law 'bout it

> Then there's the money.

Single payer law is an idea whose time has come.

The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).

Dark patterns in software usually involve UI/UX, so knowing to code doesn't really help with those. On the other hand, being able to code an app might be enough to make someone go "why is it like that? I know it doesn't have to be!" in response to a dark pattern.

Yes. This is what I meant. Experience in code lets you see dark patterns quickly in software. Experience in law lets you see them in _everything_.

This is a stupid answer. And I don't mean it's ignorant, I mean it's stupid.

The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field."

You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.

I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of service and avoid terrible outcomes. This is sadly true even when you go to a gastroenterologist.

"Too extreme" is putting it mildly. Most people couldn't even afford to go to law school. A great many wouldn't have the spare time to study another specialty and a lot might not even be capable of competently understanding the material even if they did go to law school (we all have our strengths and weaknesses after all. For example I'd be a hopeless doctor, chef or teacher). And that's before you've factored in that you also need to keep on top of any new case studies and changes in legislation else risk your knowledge becoming irreverent.

In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).

I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here.

However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers.

You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music.

You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere.

Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another.

So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.

I don't think there's anything uncivil about calling something as stupid as "if you don't want to be a victim of the very legal foundation of the country you live in, you must:

a) be smart enough to get into a very competitive professional school (most people don't have a college degree, which is required, and even objectively bad law schools are somewhat hard to get into),

b) be wealthy enough to pay for it (it costs on average $150k plus opportunity costs),

c) be interested enough in it to actually consider it, and

d) be... stupid enough to actually do it (there are too many lawyers, and less than 1/4 of them say their education was worth it)"

stupid.

> The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.

And this is exactly why "just go to law school" is a stupid answer in this context.

There's a lot of hostility to unpack in your response, but I'd just say this: It costs nothing to study law, you don't need a college degree to pass the bar, and it's a useful life skill the way understanding code is. If you have the ability to study something that would benefit you and don't choose to, that's a waste of intellect. If you feel the need to deride it as well, that's indicative of having a chip on your shoulder. Ultimately your unfounded class assumptions and indignation at people who try to better themselves by learning as much about the system we live in as possible are a lot of wind and water, and speak more about your insecurities and fear of learning something that seems scary. Make all the appeals to popular emotion you want - they don't change reality. The reality is that people who can read and write legal documents have an ability to execute all of the business strategies that the smartest minds on HN struggle with; for the same reason that those brilliant minds can execute algorithms in binary that the average lawyer can't conceive of. If you could know both languages, why wouldn't you? Your comment is fundamentally no different from one which derides learning math as an elitist activity, when someone else says it's a way of making sense of the natural world. Or who says that learning another language is only for the elite.

Just to respond to this and all the others at once:

The reason my family optimizes for law school as a default is that it's not a specialization, it's a baseline way of thinking about and dealing with any business or life situation you find yourself in. Just as "programming" in the general sense is not a speciality and is something I think everyone should be versed in as a logical form to call upon when needed, their view is that thinking as a lawyer is crucial. Whether you ever practice law or not. This is far different from delving into the specifics of some field of law or, in your example, medicine. It's as general a type of logic as you might get from a degree in philosophy; it just happens to be a lot more useful when you need to get things done in the here and now.

My father's command was: Be whatever you want but do it after you're a lawyer. I didn't do that, but then again, I'm the least successful of my brothers.

All I meant by my original comment was that there's a rationale to it: This is not one aspect of medicine. It's applicable to every endeavor in life. Taking the time to become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the law is roughly the same as learning the CLI for the operating system that your society runs on. Most people are only familiar with the GUI.

And for the person who said no one can afford to go to law school: Many of the best I know went to night school or even studied completely on their own, and passed the bar while they were working other jobs full-time. Just like many of the best coders.

Does that mean that everyone on HN should have a computer science degree, a marketing degree and an MBA?

Don't forget the medical degree so you can "do your own research", and the mechanic qualifications so you can avoid being scammed when it comes to fixing your car.

At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.

This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.

My "hack" around this is, have a friend that's a lawyer.

I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too.

To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them.

I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.

That's the right hack in a lot of cases. Where would we be without friends who know more than we do about these things? But those friends also educate themselves in a lot of fields - and they know what they are or aren't qualified to answer. So if I ask a friend who's a graphics guy about lighting he can help me, but he'll point me to someone better. Or if I ask family members about a specific legal thing, they'll refer me to someone more specialized in a particular form of law. Nothing wrong with that. It's more like: I need to know enough at least to tell whether I'm being bullshitted or not; I trust my friends to know enough to tell me if they can't fully answer my question. But there is nowhere in that chain where knowing more isn't valuable.

It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all.

Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively.

Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.

What makes you think that these are systemic _problems_? Maybe they _are_ the system? SCNR. I am completely with you. There is a good deal of acquired helplessness involved where small deviations from that "system" are always are conceived as degressions, so the system can not be questioned in general. Wait for the "but capitalism is the best we could come up with so far" arguments to arrive. They are not completely wrong and part of the game...

As a total outsider my first instinct was to agree. Then I thought about aspects in my country (Germany) and thought that while not so obvious and blatant we have basically the same problems. And they grow year over year.

Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react?

Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees.

There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like.

Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals.

The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament.

Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time.

Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people".

So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.

Economists have all sorts of names for these.

For examples, imposed barriers for law or medical school is a form of barriers of entry. The profit-seeking motive becomes rent-seeking then, because the number of competitors is artificially lower.

It saddens me to see a whole generation grow up losing the DIY ethos that let Americans develop into the strongest, wealthiest middle class of any country in history. It's one thing to demand a better social safety net; it's another entirely to abandon the freedom-to-DIY engine that is the reason immigrants like my family still line up for years to come to America. Those who move to Norway get the benefits but those who come to America have the opportunity for greater rewards. Along with much greater risks. It's frankly insulting to assume they don't know what they're getting into.

And if/when a family like mine puts themselves through law school - this generation wants to slag it as if that represents privilege or assimilation?

My father was responsible for having hundreds of criminal convictions overturned in one single civil rights case before the supreme court of California. His parents didn't even speak English. I guess he shouldn't have put himself through law school taking on debt and selling shoes?

>"The answer according to my family: Get a law degree"

Form your own country and become a president.

As useful a suggestion, but at least this one was funny.

If that's their response, then you should also expect them to get a computer science degree every time MS Word shows a vague popup and every time their OS hides or changes the way it works, or every time a major software update breaks existing functionality.

I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!

> The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking

We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt.

In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step.

Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm

I'd counter that if you expect people to handle all your legal issues, your software issues, your financial issues and your medical issues, without a solid understanding of any of those fields, you're also going to spend (and likely waste) a lot of money h and be less effective than if you knew what was going on.

Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.

The statistics don’t support your assertion. Most people aren’t lawyers, and the median amount of money a person spends on legal counsel is pretty low.

The question in any given area you outsource to experts isn't how much you spend, but what percentage you waste as a result of lacking domain specific knowledge. For instance, I'm not a good auto mechanic, let alone an expert. But I've read my car's factory service manual end to end, and looked up a lot of what I didn't understand. I don't usually have to ask a mechanic what's wrong, but if a mechanic tells me something I understand what they're talking about and what it should cost, and thus, I might pay $1000 for a job where someone else would pay $3000. Having as much domain specific knowledge as you can is always a good thing. That's the point. Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money. It's about getting what your money is worth without getting scammed.

1. You're improperly discounting opportunity cost, which is making your math incorrect.

2. You might have saved the same amount of money by taking your car to more than one mechanic to get an estimate, without having done all that research.

3. "Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money." On the contrary, that's exactly what it's about, algebraically speaking. Income minus expenses is profit, a/k/a wealth.

Now, don't get me wrong - I don't disagree that it's good to know things; I went to university and then law school to get a well-rounded education (I'm an attorney as well as an engineer). But that doesn't mean I spent my time in the most economical way possible. (Law school was very expensive, and I don't even practice law.) If I scrubbed toilets for a living, I'd be way worse off than I am today, even if I knew how to fix my own car.

How do you know the second or third mechanic you take your car to isn't shining you on? My hourly time is $200, when I'm on the clock. Nothing spectacular, but not bad for a drop-out. That doesn't mean I can't do 4 hours of yeoman's labor in my free time to save myself $200 in legal or accounting or insurance or construction contractor or mechanic's fees. Plus I end up educating myself in some field I'm less familiar with. Doesn't that education more than offset the lost opportunity cost, considering it's done in my off-work hours and only at the expense of entertainment?

Congratulations might be the wrong word, but I applaud that you chose to become an attorney and an engineer; that type of combination is the gold standard for my family. I can't believe it's something you'd ever regret.

My argument throughout this thread has been misconstrued. All I'm arguing for is that people should use every available opportunity to educate themselves, and that certain things (to me, logic, computer science, legal, mechanical, biological, historical, and literary - but your preferences may differ) are valuable tools that are worth constantly continuing to educate yourself in.

On refraining from spending money: If you buy things that are worth what you paid for them (as an expendable or an experience), or things that increase in value over time, then spending money is fine. i.e. a fairly agreed-upon trade benefits both parties. The loss of net value comes in with friction in the transaction. Generally, spending money unwisely. If you require an expert go-between for every transaction, those fractions add up to the difference between your income and expenditure. Put more bluntly: The money I save on mechanics because I read the manuals and/or do the work myself is money I save. When I do want to spend money, it's not a problem if I'm getting what I expect from it, because it's an equal trade. The only loss would be if I didn't willingly agree to pay for what I got.

This is one of those answers that will get written up about in the New Yorker. Clearly the most logical answer for this audience…

Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.

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