Law for engineers
Someone recommended a lovely essay to me by James Boyd White: Constituting a Culture of Argument: The Possibilities of American Law (a chapter from a book, When Words Lose Their Meaning). I'd link to it, but it's not available online. Try your local library.
Boyd White left English literature for law study, and found the interrelations of the two disciplines interesting and pleasant. His concern and respect for the law as expressed in this essay is deeply felt, and I wish that engineers who are contemptuous of lawyers would give this chapter a try.
From what I can tell, engineers think that law is something that lawyers manipulate to get something done so that they'll be paid. So lawyers are tricksters and the law is a tool. And lawyers, seen this way, are likely to be terrible dinner companions.
James Boyd White tries to explain that law is a collective conversation — a highly formal one, sure, but a narrative nonetheless:
The law is best regarded not so much as a st of rules and doctrines or as a bureaucratic system or as an instrument for social control but as a culture, for the most part a culture of argument. It is a way of making a world with a life and a value of its own. The conversation that it creates is at once its method and its point, and its object is to give to the world it creates the kind of intelligibility that results from the simultaneous recognition of contrasting positions.
. . .[The law] establishes roles and relations and voices, positions from which and audiences to which one may speak, and it gives us as speakers the materials and methods of a discourse.
So law is a conversation that allows us to find meaning, or talk about meaning, in the world. It's very self-consciously rhetorical, actually — we lawyers always talk about how we should talk, who has the right to talk in a given context, what forms of argument are acceptable, how to constitute community and government and authority. Yes, truth may be contingent, and that's very annoying to the engineers — but that is how we make something out of nothing, a government out of people, without killing one another.
The Declaration of Independence is seen by James Boyd White as an inspirational text, something written to recreate in the hearts of all who read it the same feeling of a grand motive based on a sense of common identity. It's a lawyerly text too — it's an argument as well as a declaration.
So lawyers try to articulate basic commitments all the time, and judges often write highly rhetorical and symbolic opinions. We're all working on a conversation, and many points of view need (and deserve) to be aired as part of this conversation. It's supposed to be an open system, the law — more like music or English literature than it is unlike these humane pursuits.
It's fine to be cynical, and to dislike the niceties of lawyers, and it's also too often true that you get the law you pay for. But I do wish that the engineers weren't quite so dismissive of the lawyers. They're not all bad.
Comments
5 Responses to “Law for engineers”
Got something to say?
From what I can tell, engineers think that law is something that lawyers manipulate to get something done so that they'll be paid.
I can see how this impression may materialize, particularly when skimming various blogs and the like. However, to homogeneously charactize engineers as carriers of this attitude is something of a limited take on the phenomenon. I think the populace in gereral has this skewed view of lawyers.
good point. I've been focused particularly on the engineer-lawyer dynamic, because both groups are involved in internet policy. but you're certainly right that lawyers don't have a good name generally. sigh.
Engineers must deal often strictly and purely in logic, while law really partners with logic, but can't stay there. Law must engage a sometimes broader mix, so it might be frustrating for some engineers to see their pristine maiden of logic so inconsistently flirted with, especially when their cause finds a setback, as engineers tend to be idealists. Dealing with logic may encourage that mental trait from time to time.
But I do wish that the engineers weren't quite so dismissive of the lawyers. They're not all bad.
I do wish that the lawyers weren't quite so dismissive of the engineers. They're not all lawyer-bashers.
In my experience (as an engineer, as if you can't tell) a lot of the same people who make derogatory comments about lawyers do so because it's “the thing to do”, and in fact have a lot of respect for lawyers.
I have a lot of respect for engineers. I don't think this post is dismissive of them at all.