On Fri, 3 Jun 2022 at 14:16, Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote: > Well, #1 we are a bunch of jailhouse lawyers without even the source > documents in front of us. Who knows EXACTLY what IBM agreed, or how it is > effectively modified by the operation of law, or what exactly transpired > between IBM and AT&T.
Indeed. Anyone who has ever seen a program written by a lawyer may appreciate this. I have seen a few (mostly but not entirely spreadsheets), and it just reinforces my thinking that lawyers live in a "differently logical" world from the rest of us. Many of us here have all kinds of experience dealing with lawyers and contracts (to say nothing of personal matters), but that kind of "legal experience" doesn't make us lawyers or even experts. Looked at another way, "legal reasoning" is a law school topic of instruction and study, and is generally the thing that we programmers take to because it most closely resembles programming, and we like to think that the law is algorithmic in nature. But legal reasoning is very far from being "the law", and is actually quite a small part of the education of a lawyer. Applying it other people's cases to conclude that this or that judgement is correct or will obviously be overturned is just silly. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN