As someone who has both a computer science degree and a law degree (and who, before that, was interested in both computer science and law), the intersection between the two has been interesting to me for a long time.
I think there’s an opportunity for people to be traffic controllers at that intersection. I remember reading an article about John Gage in WIRED, back in the day:
“John’s what anthropologists would call a shaman,” says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. “He’s someone with a foot in two different worlds. In the Valley, Gage looks like a policy guy. But to political people, he looks like a high tech guy. But the fact is that he’s really a social engineer—he knows how to hack human systems.”
Promisingly (at least for people like me), the intersection is becoming well trafficked—and with interesting vehicles passing through.
So, naturally, I took some interest in Matthew Skala’s essay “What Colour are your bits?” Michael Froomkin thinks it’s “fun”, but “missing something important”. James Grimmelmann thinks it’s “a pretty convincing theory”. Donna Wentworth calls it “very interesting”.
I think there’s something to what he says, but I’m not entirely sure its Colour. Perhaps it’s just as simple as realising that both law and computers are based on rules—but they’re different rules, and they operate differently.
It may not be completely apropos, but I’m reminded of something Donald Knuth said (evoking Neal Stephenson) in the first lecture of Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About:
I have a kind of radical idea about this, but I’ve had it for 30 years now and still haven’t found anything wrong with it. …
I’m convinced that computer science grew so fast and is so vital today because there are people all over the world who have a peculiar way of thinking, a certain way of structuring knowledge in their heads, a mentality that we know associate with a discipline of its own.
(On Monolith, which apparently prompted all this, see LawMeme, Boing Boing, Copyfight.)
