There is a lively debate going on among members of the skeptical listserv I frequent about Senator Fielding’s call for a Royal Commission, with one poster commenting:
I always thought that Senator Fielding was a dill, but his latest call for a
Royal Commission into climate science really takes the cake. The notion that
lawyers (who do most of the talking in Royal Commissions) can credibly debate
scientific issues, or that scientists would take any notice of what lawyers
think about climate science, is absurd. It displays a very revealing ignorance
by Senator Fielding of science and how science works.
There then follows some cordial (and not so cordial) lawyer-bashing, until a couple of people pointed out that, well, when it’s been asked to do the job, the law has been very good at getting to the bottom of something complicated. The most recent example (on the science front) was the Dover Intelligent Design Case, which required a ruling as to whether something was, or was not, science.
I then made the following comment, which I think is worth distributing more widely:
For once (sticking up for the lawyers here, probably because I am one) I agree with [xxxxx]. People on all sides should be careful what they wish for, because good lawyers are uncommonly talented at digging through a mountain of data and extracting nuggets of useful and relevant information. [xxxxx] has already mentioned the Dover Intelligent Design Case, but the lawyers had to do the same thing with the David Irving case in 2000 in the UK (there, the question concerned whether something was ‘history’ or not). There have been plenty of other similar cases, too.
I realise many people despise lawyers, in large part because they often seem more skilled in circumvention of the law than in its application, but good ones — as those put in charge of Royal Commissions and Inquiries and the like usually are — will be very bright, very organised and capable of assimilating more data in a week than most people have to assimilate in their lifetimes. They also have particular court-conferred powers, like discovery, where parties are forced on pain of a contempt ruling to put everything on the table.
Going to law, in this case, may actually be very useful for people on all sides of the issue: the data will be made available, the data will be analysed with great care in an environment designed to drain the emotion out of the debate and lawyers will bring a particular set of forensic skills to that analysis. The David Irving case (and subsequent work in Oxford across both disciplines) taught me that most lawyers make notably better (and more careful) use of evidence than most historians (largely because lawyers are unencumbered by ideology, which has infected history faculties terribly of late). To the extent that science has allowed itself to become infected by ideology, then law will do similarly sterling service there.
I have no idea why lawyers are not very interested in ideology. Probably because we’re more interested in money…
51 Comments
It’s not clear to me that an argument about Intelligent Design and global warming are very comparable. One is really more a philosophical issue about what science actually is and how it should be evaluated, whereas the other is really an evaluation of various techniques in statistical physics applied to complex data sets. In this respect, I think it would be essentially impossible for people without any great knowledge to dig through the kinds of data you get and evaluate them properly. For example, I’m used to digging through lots of odd data sets that have large amounts of error in them, I’ve got some knowledge of statistical physics and complex computational systems (I’ve even published papers in the area), but I very much I doubt I could fairly evaluate what’s out there well even if I had a reasonable amount of time. Alternatively, it’s easy for me to think of arguments against intelligent design.
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Alternatively, I imagine there probably are some lawyers out there who were once bored or unemployed physicists that really do have a good understanding of the area, so I don’t think it should be impossible to find reasonably qualified people. However, even if that was the case, I don’t see why any scientist would especially care about the findings of lawyers in this area, especially those who spend all day looking at and evaluating data from this area.
Lawyers are very interested in ideology, imho.
They just know how to check their ideology at the door, because if they can’t, they suck at their jobs.
Also, Conrad, we could just employ R&D Tax advisors, who often have PHDs. Plus there are plenty of specialist lawyers with excellent science knowledge.
Good lawyers are good at analysing issues in areas they know nothing about or did not know anything about when they started on the project.
I am not an AGW sceptic (tho i wish I didn’t feel the need to say that so often) but one thing that bothers me a bit is that there is probably no single scientist competent to judge all the evidence and projections on the matter.
They stitch together from the work of others they accept a very complex set of findings and forecasts.
Maybe that happens in all complex areas of science and technology.
I don’t think a Royal Commission would help tho it would be interesting.
“They stitch together from the work of others they accept a very complex set of findings and forecasts. Maybe that happens in all complex areas of science and technology.”
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I would think that is probably true (perhaps not quite all) — even in restricted areas. Looking at google scholar, for example, I noticed a paper I’m on now has over 1000 citations — to read them all, I would have had to have read over 100 papers per year just for that paper alone. Of course, I’m not going to do that, but even flipping through abstracts is quite some effort.
I am a GW skeptic – I accept that the earth is getting warmer, but cannot accept on the basis of the current evidence that it is solely attributable to anthropological actions. (For an interesting skeptical read see “Heaven and Earth -Global warming: the missing science” by Prof Ian Plimer). As someone with half a foot in both camps: as an engineer with law degree, I believe that lawyers would be eminently qualified to sort the wheat from the chaff. Courts make decisions every day on a wide range of often complex technical issues, and are able to call upon expert evidence where necessary. I personally think that a Royal Commission would be a total waste of time and taxpayer’s funds.
I agree with SL with a strong qualification: provided lawyers are suitably chosen.
Senator Nick Minchin, leader of the climate change denialist faction has a BEc and LLB. He describes himself on his parliamentary web page as a solicitor. Tony Abbott also has a BEc and LLB plus an MA from Oxford.
Ross Garnaut and Nick Stern are both economists not climate scientists, but they seem to have successfully digested the relevant scientific literature. I have no doubt that there are lawyers who can, although being a lawyer is not an automatic qualification for the job.
The really idiotic thing about Fielding’s call for a Royal Commission is his suggesting that it be co-chaired by Ian Plimer, who is a paid-up denialist and has proved himself impervious to rational discussion on the subject of climate change.
Tim Lambert has repeatedly exposed Plimer’s claims as nonsense and Plimer’s unwillingness to respond to criticisms at http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/plimer/
All of you are right about choosing the right people for the job — that goes without saying. Also, too, to get the benefit out of skilled lawyers, one needs to choose people who are both (a) skilled and (b) lawyers. Plimer is therefore automatically disqualified.
My personal pick would be a panel of retired supreme court judges.
I’m really not sure how a royal commission would help. the pro side would simply bring forward the mountains of peer review supporting the case. However as we delve into climategate we learn how sceptics were locked out of debate making their input of less value for obvious reasons.
This is an interesting thought experiment. I have often compared and contrasted the methods used by historians and lawyers. One important difference is that lawyers are more constrained in both the issues they are “qualified” to try to resolve and the methods permitted to use.
An historian has more freedom when it comes to evidence. For example, an historian can construct a real doozy of an interpretation of an event based upon a newly found vase-painting from 620 BC. OTOH, legal proceedings are filled by evidentiary admissibility issues and a priori exclusions. While historians will take to the journals and conferences to thrash out the significance of the newly found archaic vase painting, a judge might not even let it into the court-room.
One area where lawyers and historians are similar is how often they have to deal with issues in which they have not had the training that is otherwise available. For example, even the Classicist with that most auspicious of university humanities training – Oxford’s 4 year BA in Literae Humaniores, more commonly known as “Greats” – might have studied no math or science since O-level, and thus when a new scroll is found reputed to be the work of Ptolemy or Archimedes, might have to wonder across the campus to his drinking buddy’s shoebox in the math/physics department.
Similarly, lawyers are always wheeling in psychiatrists, geologists, even historians – Mabo anybody – to bolster their client’s legal claim.
SL raises Pilmer. I’m not sure how he could be automatically disqualified from the Royal Commission. However, I could imagine the Royal Commission turning into Jarndyce v Jarndyce by the time they’re finished with deciding which expert witnesses are acceptable. I mean WTF is a “climate scientist”? Please.
“My personal pick would be a panel of retired supreme court judges.”
I hate to sound ageist but don’t we need agile young minds to sought this out rather than old men who sit in God’s Waiting Room?
Peer reviewing will only get you so far; the four stages are, roughly,
(1) That the theory is testable (has it been tested?)
(2) That the theory has been peer reviewed, (peer reviewing usually reduces the chances of error in the theory)
(3) The reliability and error rate (100% reliability and zero error are not required, but the rates must be reported)
(4) The extent of general acceptance by the scientific community.
Evidence that opposing material has been deliberately excluded would bear on (2), which may bring the best evidence rule into play (rather than just findings being admitted, the court may also demand original data sets so they can be tested by court-appointed witnesses).
It is the fact that the lawyer is so constrained in what the court admits that makes him more careful in his use of evidence; it is almost impossible to generate theories out of whole cloth. Also, the vase (were it relevant) would be admissible under the ‘ancient document’ rule, as Athenian vases showing same-sex shenanigans were in Romer v Evans 1993 WL 19678 (Colo. Dist.Ct. 1993). This decision was later appealed to the SCOTUS but affirmed.
SL
I meant the vase in a more general or metaphorical sense, and said he “might not” allow it.
SL
I am very sceptical of the way academics hide behind the figleaf of “peer review”; more so in the “new” humanities than the physical sciences. I mean, how much more confident about the robustness of results when say a Cultural Studies/Media Studies academic indignantly insists her “research” published in Social Text makes her an expert on anexoria, as it had been “peer reviewed”?
Years ago, I did a Masters level Econometric Modelling course, which was really fascinating in that the teacher was so punctilious about following the “scientific method”. But our first assignment was one of those few moments in one’s education, which is a point of discontinuity or at least inflection.
We were given an article by an American econometrician about the effects on cigarette consumption following the banning of tobacco advertising on Greek television.
The first part of the assignment required us to obtain the data set used, and to follow the model as outlined in the paper and make sure that the results in the paper could be reproduced exactly. They could not. For two reasons: the American economagician had made a transcription error in one data point, the consequences of which reverberated throughout the entire paper.
The second part of the assignment required us to test the sensitivity of his results to the type of econometric modelling process chosen. Now the American’s choice of model was rational and well-justified. But when we tried other seemingly just as rational and well-justified (and more recent) approaches, again, the impact on the results was significant.
Ever since then, when ever I am presented with conclusions from empirical data I always look for how accessible the author has made that raw data. It is very rare.
I wrote a lengthy research paper in ancient history assessing Edward Said’s argument that the origins of modern day “Orientalism” lay in ancient Greece, even in Homer. Every single piece of evidence he cited was fudged, mistranslated, or egregiously misdated. When I read research from – one in particular – famous classicist who was a total Luvvie, I became suspicious of her reasoning about Aeschylus’ The Persians. So I bought a copy of the play, which had the original Greek on one page, and English translation on t’other (for $150 if you please!!!). It turns out this standard translation was by said Luvvie. In no less than 15 places was her English translation so out of whack with the Greek, and each time supporting Said’s thesis. My lecturer loved my discovery so much, he gave the paper 95% (hey, which reminds me I was supposed to try and get the fucker published). The only reason I even thought to do that was because of my Econometrics teacher.
ALWAYS go back to their original data set.
Editor of the British medical journal, Richard Horton, the Lancet on peer review:
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. ”
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/172_04_210200/horton/horton.html
Other leading journal editors have expressed similar views on peer review in candid moments but usually not quite so colourfully!
Science, in spite of its inherent strengths and notwithstanding its successes, is just as blemished as every other human institution.
On translating and accurate data sets: have a read of this paper by a classicist who proceeds to pwn both a lawyer (one of my teachers for the BCL, too, natch) and a historian on careless translation. It’s on the Greeks, so you’ll have language access that I don’t, although (with minor disagreements) my Hellenist friends here really rate it. Some of the material on Foucault/social constructionism is now out of date (written pre Rictor Norton’s big study), but it shows you how mistranslation can go badly wrong.
It’s from the Romer v Evans case, too.
“on peer review”
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Actually, I don’t think the problem is with peer review, it’s with the general public’s knowledge of how peer review works. Basically there are:
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a) Lots of crappy journals where essentially anything gets through
b) A few really good journals that reject too many good things (Psych Review, probably the best journal in psychology, for example, rejected Kahneman’s paper that was one of the main things he got the Nobel prize for. Nature rejected the two most cited paper in Chemistry ever — from the same guy!)
c) Political bias in many top journals (like Nature) where “big-names” are let though easily, especially in areas where the data/idea is always debatable (like social sciences).
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You see the abuse of (a) when people say “it was a peer reviewed paper and must be good”. Unfortunately, if you’re not in the area you are interested in, you will never know what is good and bad (unless you go and look up the journal in the ISI or similar). Try comparing the names Psychological Review and Psychological Research for example (or great vs. junk). Who would know the difference? This is compounded by (b) because good papers that get rejected from good journals still want a home, so they can end up in average journals (note that this problem isn’t so bad if you arn’t the author, because it’s downgrading good stuff versus upgrading junk).
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(c) is a problem because if you come from American Ivy-league university X, then you get in far more easily than if you don’t. A good strategy of evaluation is therefore to look at the author. If they’re in and come from a crappy university (that’s most universities), it’s most certainly going to be a good paper. If they’re from a great university, it will need further evaluation. A second strategy with these is to look at the “associated” paper that often comes with the Nature/Science paper and see where it is published. You get these in many areas because you can never say what you want in the 2000 words (or whatever the tiny limit is) that you have.
SL
Thanks for that. I’ll have a squizz. But I will say upfront that Martha Nussbaum is the scholar’s scholar. And depsite not even having a JD, she is (or was) a professor at U.Chicago Law School! She was one of the coterie of classicists and ancient historians who derided Foucault’s books on sexuality when they were first published.
More recently – and deliciously – La Nussbaum also delivered a sensational bitchslapping to Judith Butler.
Not sure who this Norton cove is, though.
The Australian Financial Review reports today (“Laws for a new world”) that there are a number of side events in Copenhagen at the climate conference next week, and some of them are of particular interest to lawyers.
It names Paul Curnow of Baker & McKenzie, Louise Hicks of DLA Phillips Fox and Tony Hill of Blake Dawson as three of the Australian lawyers who are attending.
It seems that if there were a Royal Commission, there may be no difficulty in finding Counsel Assisting who have excellent grasp of the issues.
Mike – yes I saw that too.
JG: Lorenzo’s big post was on Rictor Norton’s work. Go read!
The eminence of Wikipedia suggests that peer review works. Or mostly works. Or can mostly work if setup correctly. Or something….
Maybe.
Oh I nearly forgot. Of course, the vilest of the vile was the Colorado legislature that passed that abominable law!
Right, I’ll put this comment here in the hope that everyone reads it.
I have just binned half-a-dozen comments from people that were downright abusive, that (among other things) accused other commenters of being religious nuts, drug addicts and general scum. Thankfully none of them got through, otherwise I’d have taken out the SOONING tool quick smart, but it’s not a tone we want around here. Maybe I’m especially sensitive today because I’ve just had a meaningful encounter with H. Pylori, but I’d ask that everyone keep it clean, non bitchy and polite.
/going off to lie down, doubting that a cup of tea will stay down…
Oh dear, that’s no good, SL – hope you feel better soon!
Excellent post. The David Irving case is a good example. Having listened to an excellent lecture on the subject by the Prof. (Richard Evans) who was the lead expert historical witness: he was both very impressive, and very impressed by the legal process.
There is, in fact, a AGW example in that An Inconvenient Truth was subject to a legal case in the UK where (from memory) the judge found some of the film’s claims were scientifically dubious but not enough to invalidate it as a documentary for schools provided it was accompanied by suitable warnings.
JJ
The Clark principle of econometrics:
“If the data is sufficiently tortured, it will confess”.
Yes, going back to the original data is vital: that really is at the heart of Climategate. The notion of taxpayer-funded scientists having “secret” data and data-adjustment algorithms is an offense against both public ownership and elementary scientific procedure. (Science is not what scientists do, it is what they ought to do.)
There are some wonderful takedowns of Said (I reviewed one here) but yes, you must get your piece published.
Sounds like the judge stuffed up very badly on the Al Gore film: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/update_on_the_nine_alleged_err.php
Lorenzo
The point about the Econometrics paper was that the author had not erred in bad faith. In transcribing numbers from a table published by a reputable Greek (maybe the Greek equivalent of our ABC; I can’t remember exactly) source, he had written 99 instead of 66, or 166 instead of 66 (I can’t remember which). The paper was from data in the early 1980s.
The point was that such errors are easily made and completely human. It just means one has to double-check everything – which clearly the “peers” who reviewed his otherwise excellent paper did not.
When this kind of thing becomes a scandal is when you get Commies like Lyndall Ryan who make the – often legitimate – excuse of “transcription” error. But Professor Ryan, sweetie, you’ve made 25 of them and oddly enough every single one of those 25 biases your results in the same direction.
Oops, Greek “ABS” not “ABC”. See how easy transcription errors are!
Some unstructured remarks:
1. It’s possible that the LLB is simply a proxy for high general intelligence (setting aside the debate over intelligence). In such a case the training is irrelevant. The quality of the candidate students is what causes the observed outcome.
2. Alternatively, law students are trained to throw every possible argument at the judge, within the rules, that is even remotely plausible. Judges are ex-lawyers and are experienced in such snow-jobs, and must develop a sifting skill to zoom in on important nuggets of evidence and law.
3. You may be overselling lawyers. I suspect that there’s a large measure of “second order incompetence” in the field – smart, bold lawyers who are used to “cramming” a field for a few weeks. They are likely to think they’re better at a subject than they really are.
4. It would be nice to have somebody other than lawyers, lawyers and still more lawyers in Parliament. MPs have or quickly develop very well-calibrated paranoias. They can easily distrust any amount of science and believe anything their mate the Member for Woop-Woop told them in the member’s dining room toilets.
The instructive example for point 4. is the way CFC regulation came about. It followed a similar life-cycle to start with, with furious pro and contra camps forming mostly along partisan lines. What pushed regulation across the line was Margaret Thatcher convincing Reagan that it wasn’t bullshit. Thatcher wasn’t a lawyer – her undergraduate degree was in chemistry.
JC
Actually The Lady qualified as a barrister after reading Chemistry at Oxford. In the UK, you do not need to get a Law degree from university in order to become a solicitor or barrister. Until quite recently most didn’t. An acquaintance of mine read Geography at a Cambridge, and is now a partner at one of the “Magic Circle” London firms.
True, but I believe my point still stands.
Global warming science has already had an equivalent of a Royal Commission. It’s called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It reviews all the peer reviewed literature relevant to climate change and produces “Assessment Reports”.
(Principles governing IPCC work” IPCC 2006)
The IPCC has to get unanimous agreement from the government reviewers, so it is quite conservative. e.g. in its 4th Assessment Report (2007)
- It entirely omitted the impact of ice-melt on sea level rise from AR4 because there is still uncertainty.
- The governmental reviewers reduced its ‘confidence’ on human attribution of warming over the last three decades down a level (from very high confidence to high confidence).
JC
I agree with you. Just being pedantic on that particular point. Though I think the broader point about the differences in admission to professions between oz and Britain is interesting nevertheless.
I will make one observation (because it is very widespread among practitioners): the lawyers who go into parliament are often not very good lawyers. You can spot this because they think that if you make a law, you can ‘fix’ whatever the messes around you may be. Good lawyers are far more modest about what the law can and cannot achieve.
I do suspect law may be a proxy for very high g, although that said, both in Australia and the UK, lawyers almost always have a qualification other than law (I do, so does LE). Arguably, I am better (in a strict academic sense) at that other thing (languages) than I am at law.
That’s pretty much a statement of second-order incompetence, right there. Bad lawyers think that they are smarter than they really are.
I’d say “we have this in my profession too”, but that’s too narrow. It’s a human phenomenon.
But while everyone is incompetent or second-order incompetent in almost every field of human endeavour, every “smart” person will have some fields they are genuinely competent with. It would be nice if Parliaments had a broader mix of genuine competence than second-grade lawyers and party hacks. Then at least you have a fighting chance that on a given policy issue, someone in the House or Senate actually knows about it in detail.
I’d also say that different fields see the same things very differently. Sometimes that difference in training or perspective can be quite useful. While I have found my time as a law student instructive, I just as frequently draw on my training as a software engineer, or my scraps of economics, or since this past semester, accounting. Really!
It’s my opinion that an intellectual monoculture in Parliament can only lead to systematic biases and blindnesses. And that’s not really good for anyone.
JC
A good example of your point was how much legal academics have dominated the push for a Human Rights Act in Australia. Surely, notions of “rights” and “human rights” should come from hoi polloi not sermonised by airy-fairy lawyers on high? As I read through the academic law journals on this issue I was stunned and a bit creeped out by the presumption and sneering attitude of many of those legal academics.
Jayjee,
One thing that most lawyers have, which (for instance) my field lacks, is a good grasp of the history of the field. They take meticulous care in legal training to point out how this or that legal institution came to pass. Usually it’s a reaction to a glaring failure of the legal system at some point.
If legal academics seem disconnected and arguing about airy fluff, it’s because they’re actually channelling the spirits of centuries-dead lawyers who had to face some great abuse in person. They also know that history rhymes – that being, in a sense, the whole basis of the field. They’re trying to avoid the bad lyrics.
Jaques (and other academic lawyers here)
I find the idea of the legal academic being involved in “research” a bit difficult to comprehend. Until quite recently, the only requirement to get tenure even at top law schools like Harvard was the JB/LLB/BA (Law/Jurisprudence). For example, Alan Dershowitz was the youngest person ever to get tenure at Harvard Law School, and all he had was his BA and a JD.
Nowadays, we have all these people doing Ph.Ds in Law. Now as you so rightly point, Law requires a great command of the past, as precedent is a central pillar of Law. Perhaps that is why so many of the Law journal articles I consulted read more like low-rent Sociology and Cultural Studies. Many, many were focused on what the Law ought to be. And invariably the source of their ought was Luvvie motherhood platitudes.
Now, I can understand many areas where Law journals make sense. Analysing the significance going forward of a major High Court decision, for example. Mabo is an easy case to quote here. But this very quickly becomes policy advice, for which training in Law is a substandard disciplinary training compared to economics, science, operations research, accounting, Agriculture, blah, blah, blah.
The major exception here, of course, is Jurisprudence, which obviously suggests itself to more traditional scholarly notions of academia and research.
I know LE is doing her PhD broadly in the area of Property Law. Perhaps she can make me the wiser.
Jayjee, my scientist parents find it very hard to understand how I could be doing a research PhD in law at times, I think.
I’ll tell you what I’m doing, broadly. A UK case about 9 years ago said that the law should change to allow a plaintiff to get profits for breach of contract. In Australia, courts have treated this proposition with great suspicion and general dislike. In the UK, it has been accepted gingerly, but the lower courts applying it have taken totally random approaches.
So – what my PhD seeks to do is to identify why we give remedies for breach of contract, and what the basis of those remedies has been in all sorts of cases. I then extrapolate out from an extensive case review to say that there are already workable criteria by which to assess whether we should award profits. And I spend a good deal of time explaining how a court could apply these criteria in various situations. So something that has caused confusion and fear need not do so.
Hopefully a court will look at my criteria and think they are useful and good. And I believe our law of contract would be more coherent and fair if my criteria were adopted (of course I do).
LE
That makes me wiser!
Would I be right in saying you are comparing and contrasting legal thought processes in cognate jurisdictions and nutting out why these differences exist, could the thinking be approved, and to what extent the cognate jurisdictions provide a model for Australian jurists to ponder?
In other words, same legal problems and conflicts, different cognitive approaches to resolving them?
Jayjee – exactly. Working out how the law could work better in various jurisdictions – particularly Australia, but I’ve also got suggestions for the English law – so have been published in a UK journal this year.
I will make one observation (because it is very widespread among practitioners): the lawyers who go into parliament are often not very good lawyers. You can spot this because they think that if you make a law, you can ‘fix’ whatever the messes around you may be. Good lawyers are far more modest about what the law can and cannot achieve.
Hah, reminds me of a statement I heard sometime ago: the world is run by the mediocre. You’re killing me SL, I don’t really want to know that our parliament is filled with mediocrity.
Your observation does explain my general disenchantment with the calibre of our politicians and I suspect it in part arises from the careerism that has come to dominate politics since the 80′s. Can we claim genuine representation when a bunch of “mediocrities” who devote the life to getting into parliament become the norm rather than the exception?
Jayjee,
Here’s an uncharitable exchange I once shared with another law student.
Naturally I exempt Legal Eagle, Skepticlawyer and my former professor Ken Parish from eunuchry. They have blogs, after all!
Jacques, LOL!
I confess to a hope that a judge might run with my theory one day. One of my articles did get cited in the footnote of a High Court judgment once, which really was a bit of a thrill. Even if it was in a dissent (guess which judge it was?) But I do also like other people’s grand theories.
I’ve never understood those who get so angry with people who disagree with their theory. If we all agreed, there’d be nothing to discuss and we’d be out of a job. (Yep, as I’ve realised, I’m a pragmatist, not an idealist)
When I worked for judges, I’d sometimes put my theories to them. I remember one judge looking at me with an eyebrow raised and saying, “That sounds rather heretical.” But he did ask questions of counsel on the topic that afternoon. The poor counsel had kittens, I think, as he hadn’t thought of it from that angle at all. Ooops.
LE
Well what you described strikes me as being very, very PhD appropriate and properly categorised as ‘Research”. But then again I have a theory that apart from criminal law (muder, etc.) Law is rooted in property arrangements.
No private property? Not much need for law!
No private property? Very little in the way of civilisation. Law doesn’t even come into it.
Jayjee, to my mind, private law is the oil that keeps the gears of society running smoothly. Take that away, and you fall into anarchy… And like you and SL, I believe that private property rights are desperately important. And I am passionate about the laws which govern what people own.
I’ve always thought of murder (and for that matter, most other criminal offences) as having a property component as well – the State getting compensation in some way for the harm or loss of a taxpayer (whether actual or theoretical), and why so many legal systems – Viking, Saxon, shariah – have a component of civil compensation for the victim’s family – ie wergild ….
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