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Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

I met a lawyer at LinuxCon Europe last year. One thing interesting she said was that of all the other professions, a software developer was the closest to actually understanding legalese. That's because devs understand if-then-else, switch-case, variables etc.. That's exactly what the legal language style is.

Whereas, said party....

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They may be good at parsing the syntax of legal text, but in my experience software people are worse than "typical" people at understanding the meaning. My hypothesis is that programming gets them used to thinking about things in absolute terms, and they cannot deal with the fuzziness inherent in law.

This is partially because developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"/"manipulating a URL can't be a crime"/"laws about disclosing protected information invariably contain a public policy exception which comports to the temperament of the dev community" are axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal system which fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully resemble the legal system we actually operate in. This results in developers sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are unprotected by the legal system because nobody can steal a number", which is a proposition that is absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a programming language" is to a programmer.

developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"

Yeah. Thankfully, the SCOTUS shares our cultural quirk, as Dowling v. United States showed.

This was a ruling in 1985 based on physical theft laws being applied to copyright. <s>It also never made it to the Supreme Court.</s> (edited -- sorry misread this part)

Since then, many other laws have been passed, and it's likely that SCOTUS would apply those rather than using this case as a precedent. They didn't make a sweeping judgement about the meaning of copyright -- only declared that a laws about theft did not apply to copyright. Specific Copyright laws passed after 1985 would probably still apply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

I think the problem though is that while legalese is hyper-defined, it is also formulaic and still defined by usage rather than specification. Software development has been less helpful for me to read legalese than reading philology textbooks.

I wish Law would be completely expressed in a logical language. If that were true all interpretation would be automatically handled by computers and software tools would help non-lawyers avoiding the cost of lawyers.

Well, law used parts of object orientation well before we started using it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_specialis

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