We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a deterministic algorithm.
> Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable
No, that's not evidence of malfunction. If the outcome is predictable, there is no reason to have a trial, and you'd expect a settlement without trial, which is exactly what happens in most cases, civil or criminal.
The only reason for the cost and expense of a trial is an unpredictable outcome.
- the non-deterministic part is largely a jury trial system, which has people who are not legal professionals, nor have domain knowledge required to grasp the problem at hand sufficiently to be able to pass a judgement. Same applies to judges of course, but specialization is likely to help
- the legal system is lacking a hard rule requiring the penalty for a violation of a law by a business to exceed the profits the business made due to the violation by a significant margin. If a car maker failing to recall faulty cars was guaranteed to be fined no less than 10x the cost of the recall if caught the decision making process would be quite different.
I am french and two days ago there was a judgment to solve a conflict between the wife of Johnny Hallidays and his first children. The predictions of the journalists (who were very confident of themselves) have been totally contradicted by the judge. All the elements of the file and the personality of people were public knowledge. My point is that even when no element is hidden, the result of a trial is fear, uncertainty and doubt. It is slightly different in America because paying a lot of money to lawyers is a very effective way to change the result. IMHO, the aim of the justice in democraty is to be fair and independant of wealth. Random is not fair.
> I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt.
It's like software, in that incremental changes are safer and ground-up rewrites are usually disastrous failures engineered by people who failed to fully understand the complexity of the application domain.
OTOH, I'm not sure a “refactor” is a meaningful concept for the legal system. Oh, sure, you can hold requirements and expected outcomes the same and change the details, structure, and organization of legal code. “Refactors” of that kind happen all the time. They aren't as significant in impact as with software, because the code isn't imperative and doesn't run on dumb machines, so refactors are mostly about readability, and don't (e.g.) improve runtime resource usage significantly.
