Friday, March 25, 2011

Trespass to Property, Law School Choice, Computer Programmers and Attorneys and their Ideas of Code

Just finished the section on Trespass to Property and it was harder than it would appear at first.  I guess that's what all this "studying the law" stuff is about.  Not everything that's commonsense matches up with what's in the law.

This is part of the torts book, and torts, generally speaking, are acts by people that harm other people.  Battery wasn't as straightforward as it might have seemed.  Assault was pretty straightforward. 

Trespass to Property was sort of wierd.  It had a couple of concepts that are a little off if you ask me.  For one thing, for something to be a tort, the tortfeasor (person doing the tort) has to have "tortious intent", meaning they have to be trying to do it.

For instance, with assault, if I try to hit you with a baseball bat, that demonstrates that I had intent:  I tried to hit you.  However, if I'm in the on-deck circle, swinging my bat, unaware that you're jogging back to the dugout and I accidentally strike you, that might be negligence, but it's not assault since assault requires tortious intent.

With trespass to property (what most folks think of as "trespassing", but called "trespass to property" to keep it distinct from "trespass to chattels" which is a different tort), you have to intentionally trespass.

However, if you walk on to land and you think it's yours, but it isn't, that's considered tortious intent.  The logic behind this is just sorta wierd.  The idea being that you meant to walk on the property.  The fact that it was a mistake ends up being no defense.  This is completely counterintuitive because you didn't mean to commit a tort. 

There's logic and history behind it, apparently rooted primarily in property rights law.  However, this is one of those cases where what you think the law means, and what it actually means are two differen things.

Okay, enough law nerd talk.  I just turned off everybody but a handful of 1Ls.  The non-legal types couldn't care less.  Anybody beyond 1L couldn't care less.

I've been looking at other law schools and thinking about re-taking the LSAT and applying to different schools.  I'm already accepted at University of Toledo.  I think with a higher LSAT, I can get scholarship offers to other schools.  However, I don't think Toledo will give me a scholarship.

In a way, I made a mistake by applying without having my best possible LSAT in the application process.  If they had denied me admission, I could re-apply with the higher LSAT.  For scholarship purposes, admitting me turned out to be a bad thing because there's really no point for me to come to them later, when already admitted, and say, "Hey, I have a better LSAT.  Why not give me a scholly, now?"

The other schools I can apply to, and that will probably accept me, and which might give me a scholarship, are really far away.  They're basically an hour and 15 minutes away.  That's one of those things where it doesn't sound that bad when you're just looking at it on paper, but in actual practice, it'd probably be akin to unholy hell.

The closest other city with a law school is Ann Arbor, which is only about 45-50 minutes away, and only a little more than a half hour from the warehouse where I work.  Although "the school that shall not be named" is there, there's also another school in the town:  Thomas Cooley.  If I re-take the LSAT and get 4 points higher, I can get a full-ride there.

So, I think I'm going to re-take the LSAT, but my primary plan will be UT at sticker price.  The best I can hope for at UT is that I might do well enough that I get a scholarship sometime later down the road.  We'll see.  I still would like to have the full tuition scholarship available, though, at Cooley.  This issue isn't decided, yet. 

Once, a long time ago, I was talking with a law student about code.  She thought I was talking about legal code, and I was talking about computer code.  The two are totally different, yet, oddly, they're pretty much the same thing. 

Both legal and computer code is a set of rules that are designed to provide a decision framework that gives you consistent output given various inputs. 

I've written code for a living.  It's hard stuff.  Now, I don't know how much to infer from the E&Es, but learning legal code is a hell of a lot easier than writing computer code.  The major difference is that instead of having to write a bunch of decision rules, I'm just learning what somebody else's decision rules are.

Plus, legal code is written in English.  Trust me on this, when computer programmers say their "language" is "english-like", they are showing you why computer programmers are not generally regarded as being mainstream humans. 

Unless your mother used to say things to you like, "dimension backpack as array from 1 to 20.  traverse array setting kount to 1.  begin loop.  If backpack (kount) value = lunchbag, then set variable has_lunch to "yes" (etc, etc, you get the idea)..." then no, computer languages are not English-like.

The other thing is that yes, legal code is detailed.  I can see what people mean when they say that you can't miss details. 

For instance, Joe Blow tells you that Farmer Brown is letting you pick strawberries for free.  You pick the strawberries.  Farmer Brown never said anybody could pick his strawberries.  Is Joe Blow guilty of trespass to property?

If you say "no" on your exam, then when you get your exam back, your first reaction will be "Mutha ****er!!!!  I forgot that you trespass if you intentionally take actions that cause things or other people to enter property that you don't have permission to enter".

So, yeah, missing that small detail will bite you.

Again, you have to take my word for it, but compared to debugging computer code, that's not a small detail.  That's a huge friggin' item.  A small detail is dimensioning a variable as double precision floating point instead of a decimal which makes your output go wonky, but only when you have more than 9 decimal places in the answer. 

Again, I'm speaking after only having studied a few chapters of an E&E book, which is basically a study aide, not a primary text.  However, I've seen study aids on computer stuff and I assure you that the study aids that teach you Ruby on Rails are not this easy to comprehend.

If legal code were computer code, the code would be simpler than the backpack code above.  It'd be like, "if tortious intent = yes and unwanted_contact = yes, then battery = true".

And you don't have to write that code.  You just have to understand it.

Plus, the law changes over time, but major changes are few, far-between and usually make the evening news.  Computer languages?  They're pretty static, but if you want to earn your living as a programmer, you'll probably have to know 3 or 4 completely different languages just to do your job.  To be a COBOL programmer you had to know COBOL (and variations thereof), JCL, at least a little Assembly language, maybe a couple of database languages like DL1 and DB2 and probably a  handful of programming utilities that were pretty much languages in and of themselves. 

Plus, about once every 10 years or so, chances are you'll have to learn and master an entirely new set of programming languages.  Not many folks are learning COBOL these days and that's because the jobs are drying up ever since Y2K came and went.  If you really want job security as a programmer, you have to update your skill set constantly, by learning entirely new skills constantly.

An old mainframe programmer like I was has next to nil in common with a new guy programming in html, asp, javascript, c-sharp, and flash.  (Yes, those are all different programming languages, and yes, it's pretty typical of the set of skills somebody would need to learn to hold down a job in that sector.)

Now, on the other hand, it doesn't take 3 years of graduate school to learn a programming language, either.  Most of them, you can learn in a year of college work, and some you can learn pretty well in a semester. 

Still, as far as detail orientation and understanding decision rules, law seems a lot easier.  Of course, this is the 0L perspective.

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