In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable engineering discipline, with accepted rules that could be learned and predictably applied. That's true to a certain extent, but only in roughly the sense that Ptolemaic astronomy is also true to a certain extent.
One might say that the practice of law is more akin to weather forecasting than to engineering. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." [0] The basis for prediction is, in essence, looking to the outcomes of past power struggles between people who wanted what they wanted and sought to enlist others — courts, legislators, executives, the populace — in their cause.
Equally famously, Holmes said: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, and even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." [1]
> In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable engineering discipline, with accepted rules that could be learned and predictably applied.
That seems to be the fatal weakness of every legal discussion on HN: too many people here think this way.
It seems like it's more like the part of software engineering that's "Figure out how to get a pull request accepted" or "Run git log and determine why this change was made" or "Present your work convincingly at a conference" than the part of software engineering that's "Fix warnings and pass tests." You're still working with systems, in a broad sense: you're working with systems of people with fairly discoverable incentives and desires. But they're very different from systems that run on your computer.
> This means that Ameri- can legal opinions today are littered with weird French terms. Ex- amples include plaintiff, defendant, tort, contract, crime, judge, attorney, counsel, court, verdict, party, appeal, evidence, and jury.
Can anyone suggest a book a lay person can read to be better educated about how to understand/engage with rigorous law? like save for reading a civ pro, con law, and torts book i don't know what i should do.
You could try reading a torts book. Since nobody but lawyers ever wants to do what you describe, the only books that get written are for law students and professionals. Learning it halfway isn't actually very useful. No-one wants to hear outsider perspectives on cases, they are pretty much never good, so nobody wants to create a hive of lay-yers ready to go spreading their terrible takes by giving them a book of handy hints. Case in point: most HN legal discussions. Call me elitist but truly we are blessed that more people don't try their hand.
A big problem is that your natural tendency to gloss over details has to be beaten out of you, mercilessly, before anyone will trust you to make an argumentative summary. You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.
Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge. And the judges are often unbound by technicalities for the same reason. Hence 1L students can read them. You'll get a great impression of what it means for judges to create law. Downside: there are no new important torts cases popping up that you'd want to read.
my goal is simply to be better able to navigate the legal system, rather than to pontificate.
>You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.
it's a little presumptuous of you to imagine that 1 i intend to be so cavalier 2 that i don't already know how to be detail oriented. fwiw i took the lsat and scored 97% - while not exactly translatable to writing a summary brief i think i'm quite capable of diving into the details (if we're to believe lsac).
>Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge.
suggestion for a good one? should i also get the e&e?
Readit News
One might say that the practice of law is more akin to weather forecasting than to engineering. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." [0] The basis for prediction is, in essence, looking to the outcomes of past power struggles between people who wanted what they wanted and sought to enlist others — courts, legislators, executives, the populace — in their cause.
Equally famously, Holmes said: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, and even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." [1]
[0] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897), https://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm
[1] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Common Law, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2449
That seems to be the fatal weakness of every legal discussion on HN: too many people here think this way.
I had no idea!
A big problem is that your natural tendency to gloss over details has to be beaten out of you, mercilessly, before anyone will trust you to make an argumentative summary. You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.
Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge. And the judges are often unbound by technicalities for the same reason. Hence 1L students can read them. You'll get a great impression of what it means for judges to create law. Downside: there are no new important torts cases popping up that you'd want to read.
>You won't make much progress with the attitude that you can just learn general principles and be slightly better at reading; you have to get comfortable diving right down to details and coming up for air later.
it's a little presumptuous of you to imagine that 1 i intend to be so cavalier 2 that i don't already know how to be detail oriented. fwiw i took the lsat and scored 97% - while not exactly translatable to writing a summary brief i think i'm quite capable of diving into the details (if we're to believe lsac).
>Torts books are good because they start with the creation of torts and build, they don't have to assume too much knowledge.
suggestion for a good one? should i also get the e&e?
Why is that? e.g. how long ago were the important torts cases, did the law or environment change?