baz.com - Brett Thomas' Blog

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy gives his thoughts on whether engineering makes a good pre-law degree. I do find it interesting that he spends a lot of time cautioning that the engineering mindset is a lot different from the legal mindset. The goal of the former is "is to understand how the world works so we can design useful tools that help manipulate it," while the latter is a fuzzy interpretation of a bunch of man-made rules and history.

I think this is exactly right. When I first started getting involved in law and technology, at PGP, I (and a lot of other engineers there) took the view that the law was a clearly codified algorithm, essentially, and that one could very carefully navigate one's way through it. PGP, quite helpfully, offered a one-day offsite for any engineers who wanted to get an overview about encryption law, and it was very eye-opening for me to realize, in fact, how fuzzy the law can be.

I think this is why engineers tend to be prone to falling for crazy legal theories. For example, there's a number of ideas out there explaining how, precisely, the Federal government does not actually have the power to collect income taxes. One of them is that the Sixteenth Amendment to the US constitution was not properly ratified - that the ratifying states ratified slightly different (punctuation, spelling and capitalization) versions, or that not enough states properly voted to ratify. There are others that turn on similar theories. What the engineering mind tends to fail to grasp is that, even if these are true, they're irrelevant. There is now more than ninety years of established precedent that the Federal government has the power to take as much of your income as they want. And no small judicial "gotcha" is going to change that.

Engineers - especially software engineers - are used to analyzing complex systems and finding the one place that they can poke to achieve maximum change. We spend all day suffering under the constraints of the systems we work with, and figuring out ways around those constraints. There is certainly some place for that sort of creative thinking in law - witness the California "off-list lower" revolt of the past couple of years. Engineers need to remember, though, that in law, precedent and tradition mean as much (or more) as the literal words in the law.