Dave’s Whiteboard

I’ve been working on courses for people who want to become paralegals. I knew at the start that my direct experience with lawyers and the law was limited, but I didn’t realize how much so.

Take “the law,” for example. I would have said “the law” means…well, laws. The statutes passed by Congress, or the state legislature, or the county, or the city. As in, “it’s against the law to…”

That’s true, so far as it goes. All these things are statutory law. So too are the regulations from certain bodies like the Food and Drug Administration. Those are administrative law.

What I hadn’t thought much about was another ocean of law — case law.

I did realize that statutes are not always that well written. Even when they are, two parties can reasonably come to two different conclusions about what the law means. To resolve the disagreement, they go to court, where the judge renders a decision.

If the case is appealed, the appellate court does not re-hear the case. Instead, the court looks how the law was applied and, very often, how other courts have interpreted the law.

Case law is a bedrock of the Anglo-Saxon system: the notion that courts should do what courts have done. When an appellate court issues a decision, that decision can become mandatory authority for other courts within the appellate court’s jurisdiction, and persuastive authority for others.

That latter means, “We don’t have to listen to the Seventh Circuit, but they seem to know what they’re talking about.”

So, for example, the idea of a constitutional right to an attorney emerged from case law (Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 — state courts required to provide counsel in criminal cases to indigent defendants), as did the idea that the police must advise you of your individual rights before questioning you (Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436).

All of this to remind myself that things are usually more complex than you think. You’ll see lots of huffing in Congress and in the media about “unelected, activist judges” who should just “interpret the law, not create it.”

(And generally, that’s a sign the speaker disagrees with a recent opinion.)

What that bromide skips over is the fact that in interpreting the law, the court ipso facto is handing down case law that other courts — and other plaintiffs, and other respondents — can and will consider in the light of their own situation.

USCS photo by tellumo / Adam Engelhart.
Arizona police photo of Ernesto Miranda from PBS.org.

Language Log’s post for Bastille Day, fittingly enough, was Dare to be bilingual.  Eric Bakovic has had a series of posts related to English-only, English-first, and the effort to make English the official language of the United States.

In the outer fringes of vented spleen, Bakovic quotes someone’s opinion that “all ATM machines which use more than English for transactions should be closed.”  (Maybe there’s more to the Federal Reserve’s discount window than I realized?)

Yesterday started off reasonably enough. I had gotten behind schedule on a deadline, but I received a stay of execution — the project manager more or less agreed with changes I proposed that ended up slowing things down.

Settled in to work bright and early. Open the in-progress documents, launch the browser to reach the content-sharing site.

Hmmm. Nobody home. Check e-mail. Hmmm.

I can reach the wireless router (though it’s hard going once I get there; the new interface was written originally in Korean, I think, and rewritten in Estonian before translated again to English). But I can’t get past the router.

My usual solution is to kick the modem. Not literally (I had to pay for it). I just go down to the kitchen, unplug the Digit Twins, pretend to wait 40 seconds, and plug them back in again.

Still no good. More troubleshooting-by-walking-around: I went down to the basement to check the TV.

Hmmm — we’re getting cable pictures. We’re just not getting cable data.

Back to the office. I call the cable company. Six voice-mail presses and 20 minutes later, I get a customer service rep whose previous job had been announcing departures at the Port Huron bus station. The outcome: they can’t even see my modem. Earlier service call? Tomorrow between 11 and 3.

I work for a while, rekick the modem (see “superstitious behavior“). Later, breaking from the excitement of actual work, I click a few shortcuts on my browser — and I can get to my blog. Not a cached page, either — the real thing.

I was about to shut off the firewall, as a test, but instead I lowered its setting. Bingo — mail, Google, the whole shebang. So I complained via my Facebook status and got back to work.

Hours passed in which the only thing I looked at online was the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. I went back to Facebook to find a note from Kate. Her partner had fallen victim to another Microsoft security update which just happened to knock thousands of ZoneAlarm users off the internet.

I’m not really that connected — I can go days with my cell phone in the side pocket of my car (which I don’t use every day). I have Twitter, but I’m not sure why: following 10 people isn’t enough, but I have no desire to follow 500. And I believe that a company buying one of those picture-and-text ad on the left side Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of selling leisure suits.

I am glad, though, that I took the time to rant, and that Kate responded. And my wife, who also uses ZoneAlarm, was even happier — because I could warn her about this tiny glitch.

“Lock gates” photo by Simon Lieschke.

P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula wonders, “Where is science blogging going?” His post is a musing about how blogs fit into the overall world of science — one in theory more rigorous than the training / learning / performance arenas I tend to frequent.

He notes that there isn’t much accountability in science blogging.

This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn’t the something that a planner would design, and they often won’t easily do something else that you think they ought to do.

He also suggests that it’s hard to design what’s going to be the next stage. Design, he says, is “a terrible paradigm for adding unexpected newness and potential (which any evolutionary biologist would tell you).”

A lot of interesting points of view in the comments on his post, as well, like this one from Blake Stacey:

I think it’s important to remember that the nature of the blogosphere is not carved in marble. A few years ago, it didn’t exist. It just is the way it ended up being. When we want something different, it’ll change. Right now, doing anything other than what we normally do might be like hammering nails with a screwdriver, but when every other tool in your toolbox is broken and getting rustier by the day, you start to wonder how you could modify that screwdriver.

It was this lengthy (and rambly) post on “What Science Blogs Can’t Do” by Stacey at Science after Sunclipse that triggered Myers’ post.

Thanks to Greg Laden’s Blog, I came across this TED talk by Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic. Serendipitous, especially after yesterday’s post about involving more of the senses. (Time: 20:43)

A comment from Tara at In My Copious Free Time (she was in the audience):

He told a story about a musician who was practicing a piece for an interview to be the associate (2nd chair?) cellist? (sorry, can’t remember) in a Barcelona orchestra. Zander thought the guy was holding back - he kept working with him until the guy was giving it all he had and the guy went away to Spain for the interview. He came back and said he hadn’t gotten the job because he played the first way, holding back. But then he said, “oh, fuck it” and went to Madrid, auditioned for 1st chair in their orchestra and got it. So Zander says that you have to get BTFI - Beyond the “fuck it” point.