Video Attorney Jim Hazard is Working to Open-Source Law (Video) 58
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Jim Hazard is a lawyer who leans geek; since he got his law degree in 1979, he's been the guy in the office who could make sense of things technical more often than others could, and dates his interest in regularizing complex legal documents (and making them a bit *less* complex) back to the era where Wang word processors were being replaced with personal computers. Most documents -- no matter how similar to each other, and how much work was spent in re-creating similar parts -- were "pickled" in proprietary formats that didn't lend themselves to labor-saving generalization and abstraction. That didn't sit well with Jim, and (in the spirit of Larry Lessig's declaration that "law is code," Hazard has been working for years to translate some of the best practices and tools of programmers (like code re-use, version control systems, and hierarchies of variables) to the field of law, in particular to contract formation. (Think about how many contracts you're party to; in modern life, there are probably quite a few.) He calls his endeavor Common Accord, and he'd like to see it bring the benefits of open source to both lawyers and their clients.
Transcript is 24 - 48 hours late
Spurious Interrupt (Score:1)
This video makes my front page look like the Compilers have had a go at it.
Adverts (Score:5, Funny)
I gave up during the third Ad. Maybe later.
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Man oh man... (Score:1)
Doesn't anyone look at these posts in Chrome before they go live? Ugly and unreadable...
Mmmm.... (Score:2)
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Flash may suck, but it's an incorrectly sized object thing.
There's an easy fix (Score:3)
WHY!?!? For God's sake, why screw things up!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the Supreme Court of the United States, any law that is not understandable to the average 8th grader is "Unconstitutionally Vague."
According to Common Law dating back to the Code of Hammurabi, any law that is not freely published for all people to read is null and void.
As an anarchist, I love things just the way they are!
Re:WHY!?!? For God's sake, why screw things up!?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
You may be an 'anarchist'; but you apparently aren't an empiricist...
Outside the adorably twee world of exposing the contradictions inherent in the system, man! the track record of people actually not being subjected to laws just because they are excessively complex, deeply confusing, unbelievably vague, or thousands of pages long and buried in a filing cabinet somewhere is deeply unimpressive. If you count various zillion-page contracts of adhesion with provisions for one party(and only ever one party) to change them unilateraly as 'law', since they do tend to be enforced on behalf of the people who write them, or the whole kangaroo-court 'binding arbitration' system, the numbers just get a whole lot worse.
It's cute, sure, but unless you have exactly the resources that would make all but the most incomprehensible or classified laws open to you(eg. nigh unlimited legal resources), it's also irrelevant.
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Oddly enough, there's a lot of truth there. In most of the world practically no citizen actually knows the entire body of law that might apply to them. This includes lawyers.
They just try to do what seems like the right thing and hope for the best.
glad I have flashblock but (Score:4, Interesting)
how did an inline image for the flash link get through the slashdot submission process? hell, anything with any kind of multimedia should be blocked, only a simple link with text between tags should be allowed.
gah! that was awful. let's keep the format clean.
()? um... (Score:2)
Am I the only one who notices TFS has an unmatched "("?
Late since we're moving away from the rule of law? (Score:2)
That's cute, but isn't is a bit late since we seem to be moving away from the rule of law?
Re:Late since we're moving away from the rule of l (Score:5, Insightful)
oh no, we're moving toward the rule of "police state and corporate fascist" law. Certain types of laws will be very strictly enforced, for the majority of people.
And the next logical step is described in... (Score:2)
....my satire sent to the US to the Department of Justice in 2002: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html [pdfernhout.net] :-) My comments to the Department
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This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999 [slashdot.org]
It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!"
about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh.
What the hell Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So that's what it is eh?
Causes me no problem on the front page. When I loaded the article I said 'oh, what's this, they are trying to load flash, wtf now? And I was spared seeing this awful bunch of crud that everyone is complaining about because this is not one of the handful of sites I trust to run javascript, let alone flash.
I'm not surprised though. They've been publishing broken links for years now, and they get away with that, why not the next level?
It's a Losing Battle (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that I'm semi-solo, I have a Git repository for all my client files. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX class and style files to make beautiful patents, pleadings, and contracts. I write patents in vi (well, Vim) when I can get away with it. But when I was at a big firm, I spent fruitless years trying to convince lawyers that there is a better way than using kludged, recycled Word files, or at least trying to convince them to use Word's style functionality instead of manually reformatting the same flipping document EVERY SINGLE TIME. All in vain. Heck, I'd be happy if I could finally convince other lawyers that underlining is not a legitimate typesetting operation and is an embarrassing holdover from the days of typewriters (along with two spaces after a period).
One thing I've learned about lawyers it that most old lawyers learned how to do something back in 1978 or so, and believe it is the One Right Way. Those lawyers learned the One Right Way from other lawyers who learned it in the 30s. If I were king of the world, I would force every lawyer in America to get a copy of Butterick's book Typography for Lawyers [typographyforlawyers.com] and Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage [amazon.com], read them cover to cover, and treat them as though they were the inviolable word of God, handed down in stone from the peak of Mt. Carmel. I am so sick of looking at ugly legal documents.
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I'll agree underlining and other typographical crimes are worth hoping for change. But two spaces after the period isn't simply about mechanical limitation, it's about separation between sentences. As a style tool, it's incredibly useful, if divisive.
There is no non-arbitrary reason to use a single space. There is no non-arbitrary reason to insist on two spaces, either. A single space trades an arguable aesthetic advantage for an arguable functional disadvantage (looking for the holes is one visual cue
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There is no non-arbitrary reason to use a single space.
Nonsense [typographyforlawyers.com]. Butterick has a very convincing argument. And now that you've seen his graphic, I challenge you to ever look at a document with two spaces without cringing. What's more, manually inserting two of any kind of white space character is ugly and hackish.
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1. It creates distracting rivers of white space. That's a non-arbitrary argument.
2. Manually inserting two consecutive whitespace characters of any kind is hackish. It is using content to approximate form. That's another non-arbitrary argument.
The fact that you remain unconvinced (presumably because you prefer two spaces) does not mean they are not arguments. Perhaps you could share with me your non-arbitrary argument on the benefit of two spaces.
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Personally, even knowing what to look for, I still had trouble seeing any difference between those two paragraphs. But maybe it's just me....I certainly don't see any "rivers of white space" (What does that even *mean*?)
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I looked at his graphic, and I still prefer two spaces between sentences. :)
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I challenge you to ever look at a document with two spaces without cringing.
I had a look, I very much doubt that I would have noticed the double spacing if it hadn't been pointed out.
Assume that I'm deliberately misleading you.
Ok, that explains your outrage at double spacing.
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How are you handling citations?
While there've been a few developments recently, there still doesn't seem to be a single, comprehensive reference solution which will handle all of the (idiosyncratic) Bluebook style rules.
William .tex documents)
(who always just uses \frenchspacing in his
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How are you handling citations?
While there've been a few developments recently, there still doesn't seem to be a single, comprehensive reference solution which will handle all of the (idiosyncratic) Bluebook style rules.
William (who always just uses \frenchspacing in his .tex documents)
I did take a gander at a "bluebook.sty" file where I could do something like \case{} with some parameters or keys, but it was never very useful because it ended up making me type more than just formatting the reference manually. Someday when I'm really ambitious, I may do one that links in to some external program that automatically inserts all the extra information and also creates a link to Westlaw or something (and KeyCites it, while I'm dreaming big). But I'm nowhere near that right now. And since I don
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There's also camel: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/camel/ [ctan.org]
I'd love to see someone manage this using biblatex --- I wonder though if the solution isn't to turn the problem around --- type the citation, then after the fact, run a tool which finds all the cites, displays them in an interactive tool and allows one to match things up and extend them w/ links as you described.
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It's not just lawyers. I've tried for years to get my writer friends to use some form of version control, but in vain. One of the great benefits of version control is makes it safe to try radical things with your codebase (e.g. novel or story) because even without branching you can simply recall the state of your work at any point in the past.
I myself used a literate programming tool to generate manuscripts, synopses, excerpts, and even alternate versions, but eventually I gave up because the dominant work
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LaTeX to generate documents is pretty resourceful. How do you manage drafts that need to be exchanged with a client or opposing counsel when they ask for a "track changes" version? What font(s) do you use?
I hate Word and its auto formatting more than any other program, so I use InDesign. Templates, high precision, access to pro-level graphics placement and text wrapping, preflight, customizable PDF output, and more. I use Courier Final Draft (sinful, I know) because monospace makes it easy to do tables
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LaTeX to generate documents is pretty resourceful. How do you manage drafts that need to be exchanged with a client or opposing counsel when they ask for a "track changes" version? What font(s) do you use?
Hence the "when I can get away with it." I have some clients that are okay marking up a PDF, and I actually have some clients who are university professors who are okay with just editing a .tex file. One of the things I really like is the way I can keep track of dependent claims in a patent as the claims change. I can do it in Word (kind of), but it's kind of kludgy, and I have to remember to hit "Print Preview" before I send out a document so the numbers auto-update.
Good luck with that (Score:1)
Let's fix the problems with Law School (Score:2)
The problem is we are graduating a lot of attorneys with $150K+ school debt so they charge $300 an hour for their services. Simply, we have too many attorneys that no one can afford! [chronicle.com]
I would submit that the stranglehold on the bar exam that the ABA has be loosened and allow accredited online law schools. I know that many believe in the "socratic method", but it doesn't mean a hill of beans if no one can afford it!
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The problem is we are graduating a lot of attorneys with $150K+ school debt
Reduce the graduation rate, supply and demand will increase their fees.
But I do agree with your sentiment, so far as I think law is way too complicated. We have laws that fix laws that fix laws that fix laws that fix laws, all the way back to when the first laws fixed laws. "Refactor" is a concept that needs more use in that field.
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>Reduce the graduation rate, supply and demand will increase their fees.
Yes, then we have a large number of $500/hr attorneys that no one can afford, except for the wealthiest among us and large corporations. Making the problem worse.
As I said, one thing that would help is getting the ABA stranglehold of the two day hazing exercise known as the bar exam. I know that most in the legal profession (and yourself) will hate this, but their emperor has no clothes.
Software is brittle (Score:2)
As a software developer, I agree that lawyers could learn a lot from software development methodology. However, when we start talking about applying software representations to law and making it 'computable', we should remember that a fundamental property of software (at least so far) is that it is brittle. I don't think you want law to be brittle. I don't think you want legal contracts that can be subverted by a buffer overflow (although that definitely would make things interesting).
Laws as they are often
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Legal contracts are routinely subverted through bugs - sorting out those bugs is what the court system spends a good deal of
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Law is Open Source Already (Score:3, Insightful)
When you go to sign a contract you are able to see the terms of the agreement (otherwise it wouldn't be binding). A closed source legal agreement example would be the statements you used to find on boxed software such as "By purchasing this software you agree to the license agreement contained within."
Linux is open source but you don't expect everyone that runs it to be able to understand the code. That's not the point. Lawyers are like exactly like developers in that they are educated to understand the code of law. The rest of us are users and when we need advice we go to see a "developer".
I do think it is important to make law understandable to a greater number of people but when you confuse the terminology used to describe your mission. It sounds more like he's trying to use software development methodologies to create legal contracts. I'd hate to be at the conference when the waterfall vs.Agile method debate breaks out between the lawyers.
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I'd hate to be at the conference when the waterfall vs.Agile method debate breaks out between the lawyers.
That's an easy one. Which is more billable?