Weighty Thoughts

I’ve written before on this and will likely do it again. Which suggests (by volume) that it is important.

One of the oddities of “logical” discussion of complex subjects, in law and out law, is the ease with which something important can be treated the same as something unimportant. Both of these are boxes, boxes are equal.

Conversely, it is possible to “decide” that when things point different directions that we simply prioritize them.

There is probably something visual going on here.

And there may be something deeper — that in a society that is schooled and ruled — opposed for present purposes to educated and experienced — people don’t have the complex neural paths that can handle multiple factors at once. We can reach more categoric opinions on things that we don’t have experience with. And conversely have trouble reaching non-categoric opinions on them. If our experience with “experience” is impoverished by spending formative years in controlled environments, then perhaps our capacity generally to work in an non-rule-seeking mode may be impaired.

If we are doomed to intellectualize judgment, perhaps What is needed is a way of weighing.

Graph Causation

One of the oddities of decision-making is how difficult it is to integrate complexity.  @marclauritsen has been working on this problem with his choiceboxes.

In legal decision-making, the impression (of this student of law) is that complexity is often handled by alighting on a few factors, or even one, and declaring it determinative.   With a turn of phrase, a subtle, complex question is turned into a simple one.  Appellate decisions sometimes embrace this kind of reasoning.

Of course, it is hard, or even impossible, to express complex relationships in text except as stories.  My maternal grandfather often told anecdotes, the point of which seemed to be to open one up to the ironies of human affairs.  They often escaped my youthful grasp but stayed with me.  My father, a lawyer, also looks for cross-currents.  But he also says, with characteristic concision, that if you have more than three factors, you don’t have a rule.  Without rules, it is hard to structure human relations.

The hard parts, the rules, need connective tissue, judgment.  He (the father) also emphasizes reading between the lines of (US-style) judicial opinions to show what the judges are thinking, as opposed to what they are saying.  Morality and prejudgment are practiced in these gaps.

Now to the point, or rather, to the lines connecting points.  Graph representations convey patterns of connections, visually and viscerally.  One can see large groups of interactions.  So, might wide-availability of visual representations of connections lead to a broader view of legal causation and of the possibilities of rules?  Something more consistent with common sense or engineering?

As an example, might the ability to see the connections among various provisions in documents and among different uses in similar documents — patterns of transacting — get us up from the phrase level analysis that so strongly characterizes US law?

Might it help us to make judgments that are more contextually informed?  Like those in close-knit communities or bayesian networks.

Might I run out of question marks?

P.S. As an aside(?) see the next post, on a difference between French and US judicial opinions.

A tale of two bridges

“The majestic equality of the law, which forbids both rich and poor to sleep under the bridges, beg in the streets and steal bread.” Anatole France, in Paris.

Further east and earlier, Leonard Euler, the great mathematician, used the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg as an example of connections.  He proved that a person could not visit each part of of the city while crossing each bridge only once.  Like a person navigating the desks of a bureaucracy imagined by Kafka.

Connecting these ideas, the paperwork of law acts like tolls on the bridges of society. While paperwork is required of all, it is more burdensome to some. It masks inconsistent treatment. The slow-down at the toll booth affects even well-informed travelers.

Euler’s math and its offspring, graph databases, seem a good fit with codified text.

For bridge fans — Konigsberg’s islands resemble those of Paris. But the bridge count in Paris is different, so it is possible to visit all parts of Paris without crossing a bridge more than once. This seems to remain so even if we lawyer the problem by excluding, say, pedestrian or one-way bridges. Anyone see a differentiator that will make the number of bridges odd for three of the land masses? Paris, kilometre 0.

A/B testing and International Law

When I was a teen, during our war in Viet Nam, there was a lot of talk, in America, about how Americans “are.”  There is inherently a lot of compaction and conflation in any such discussion, but a part that bewildered me was the failure to try to prize out what parts were statements about humans, humans in groups, humans in nations, nations of more or less strangers, English speakers, Americans.  What part was “American” about Americans.  That itch was part of what made me try living in other places.

Back to the subject:

A/B testing in running software or a business that depends on software is the process of randomly dishing out a slightly different page to two (or maybe /C three) groups, to see if A works better than B (for the site).  If you have high volumes, you can suss out rather fine issues of usability, value proposition, and the like.

In discussions of law, we have a major A/B problem.  In America, other places are far, physically and mentally.  This is strikingly so in law.  Though we trace our law back to England, we are unique.  Our federal structure, scope of jury, scope of discovery, political appointment of judges, and other features make our generis very sui.  Our politics make us reluctant to make some comparisons.

A/B can be done on some issues as among states or as before and after certain changes.  But the relatively narrow range of most changes means that faint signal is buried in big noise of place, time, and other circumstances.

By living (and therefore at least partly learning) other legal systems, we can jack up the signal.  So even if the noise is higher and more varied, you can begin to piece out what might be American about America’s legal system.  For the signal to point towards possible improvements, it is helpful to compare high-functioning systems.

Terrific conversation last night with Greg Behan reminds me that some people don’t need a B to figure out what A ought to be, their B is internal.