I agree with this heuristic in general; when I say they don’t seem to be good at this, I do mean that they don’t seem to be good at it. It’s entirely possible that there’s some underlying purpose.
Fair enough!
First, modern contract law is relatively new; the uniform commercial code, for instance, only came along in 1952.
Huh, interesting. That’s surprising to me; I expected contracts to have a sufficiently long history that there wouldn’t be any recent major innovations. In retrospect, I realize a long history alone isn’t enough to assume that: mathematics is also ancient but has seen its fair share of recent-ish innovations anyway.
Second, it took half a century for software-writing to come as far as it has, and the incentives for scalable legibility just don’t seem as sharp in contracts—so it should take even longer. At the end of the day, most contracts operate in an environment where people are invested in reputations and relationships; an oversight which could be abused usually isn’t, an accidental breach can usually be worked out with the counterparty, and so forth. It’s not like a computer which just executes whatever code is in front of it. (And even today, plenty of software engineers do throw patches on top of patches—it just seems more commonly understood in the software world that this is bad practice.)
I feel like this is part of what I was gesturing at with the “on the standards of a software developer” bit. If the nature of the domain is such that “throwing patches upon patches” actually works fine most of the time, then I wouldn’t say that lawyers are bad at what they do for relying on that. One could flip it around and say that they’re good at what they do, for not wasting effort on optimizations that largely wouldn’t make a difference.
That’s surprising to me; I expected contracts to have a sufficiently long history that there wouldn’t be any recent major innovations. In retrospect, I realize a long history alone isn’t enough to assume that: mathematics is also ancient but has seen its fair share of recent-ish innovations anyway.
From Personal To Prison Gangs is probably relevant here. As society transitions from many repeated interactions between small numbers of individuals to more one-off interactions between large numbers of individuals (ultimately enabled by communication and transportation technology), we should expect more reliance on formal rules and standards. Those formal rules and standards also need to cover more people in a wider variety of situations—they need to be more general-purpose (since people themselves are less siloed than previously).
That sort of transition seems to have been particularly prevalent around the early-to-mid twentieth century.
That’s the sort of heuristic which predicts this kind of fundamental shift in contract law (among many other things) around the time that we saw such a shift.
Huh, interesting. That’s surprising to me; I expected contracts to have a sufficiently long history that there wouldn’t be any recent major innovations.
The key change doesn’t seem to be so much about innovation but about standardization between different jurisdictions.
Standardization between multiple jurisdiction that each like their own standards is hard as shown by the US still using a lot of imperial units.
Fair enough!
Huh, interesting. That’s surprising to me; I expected contracts to have a sufficiently long history that there wouldn’t be any recent major innovations. In retrospect, I realize a long history alone isn’t enough to assume that: mathematics is also ancient but has seen its fair share of recent-ish innovations anyway.
I feel like this is part of what I was gesturing at with the “on the standards of a software developer” bit. If the nature of the domain is such that “throwing patches upon patches” actually works fine most of the time, then I wouldn’t say that lawyers are bad at what they do for relying on that. One could flip it around and say that they’re good at what they do, for not wasting effort on optimizations that largely wouldn’t make a difference.
From Personal To Prison Gangs is probably relevant here. As society transitions from many repeated interactions between small numbers of individuals to more one-off interactions between large numbers of individuals (ultimately enabled by communication and transportation technology), we should expect more reliance on formal rules and standards. Those formal rules and standards also need to cover more people in a wider variety of situations—they need to be more general-purpose (since people themselves are less siloed than previously).
That sort of transition seems to have been particularly prevalent around the early-to-mid twentieth century.
That’s the sort of heuristic which predicts this kind of fundamental shift in contract law (among many other things) around the time that we saw such a shift.
The key change doesn’t seem to be so much about innovation but about standardization between different jurisdictions.
Standardization between multiple jurisdiction that each like their own standards is hard as shown by the US still using a lot of imperial units.