CONTEXT: I WATCH TOO MUCH TV
I’m watching a documentary on Netflix called, “The Tinder Swindler” about a con artist. The antagonist is an evil swine who stole what the documentary maker guesses was approximately $10 million dollars from innocent women whom he met over Tinder.
My blood boiled. I can’t imagine a guy like that, which makes facts worse than fiction.
Last night, I watch a movie – Pig – which doesn’t end well for the protagonist and the pig. It made my blood boil (in a watching movie context).
That got me thinking about why I feel that way about ideas of injustice.
BLACK LETTER LAW
One of the things they teach you in a law degree is never to try to “learn” the law, stuff like “offer and acceptance is…”, or defacto relationships are people “who are..” don’t help you understand the law.
They call that Black Letter Law: specific instances of something that previous courts have accepted as a specific instance for or against the application of some general legal rule.
You can sort of see why people might like black letter law: the law is always a general rule, “don’t do X”. But each case is a specific instance where that general rule is tested against a real world set of circumstances.
Whether that specific instance falls within the perview of the general rule is the heart and soul of providing legal advice to a client coming to you with a problem.
So the more you can align the facts of your new problem with pre-judged specifics instances of the general rule, then the more confidence you might have your new facts are inside or outside the general legal rule.
Man walks into a bar with a dog. Bartender says, “you can’t bring dogs in here”. Automatically we’ve got a general rule (no dogs allowed) and a specific instance (this dog in this bar). Advise.
Well… Have other dogs ever come in here before? Has there been a history of dogs visiting this bar? What about if accompanied by their owners? Is the owner blind, and this is a seeing eye dog? Did Jacinda issue a decree against dogs in bars, unless the dog has self-isolated for 10 days? What happens if the dog is the bar owners dog: still not allowed?
There’s many reasons why instances may legitimately differ from a general rule.
Black letter law provides certainty: it’s in or it’s out, it’s in or it’s out.
The biggest problem with black letter law is what in data science we call over fitting: fitting to historical information performs poorly “out of sample” because it doesn’t contain any structural relationship in the data which can reliable be exploited into the future.
UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES AS STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIPS
Instead of Black Letter Law, they teach you at law school to focus on the underlying principles. These are things the law represents – which are inexactly described in legislation – but part of a “bigger” picture of things which govern societies.
One of the principles which got me thinking about this is the concept of injustice.
What is it?
It’s made up of a few concepts and ideas of things which societies believe. For example:
Injustice is:
- Innocent people being hurt by the actions of another.
- Someone deliberately misrepresenting the truth to others, causing loss.
- People getting an advantage at someone else’s cost without a fair exchange of value.
These – and they’re only examples off the top of my head, not a complete list – are the “structural relationships” within the law.
AND THE NEXT REACTION IS EMOTIVE
If the specific instance can be aligned to a general injustice principle, then the principle and it’s breach moves people. The breach creates an emotional response which, in a marketing / consumer sense, are the reasons why people make decisions and exercise choice
Judges are people to, and influenced by emotion and choice. They’re fully aware that at an emotional level, something is wrong. And injustice moves people on an emotive level. Including judges.
And that’s what makes “the law”, and is the best advice for when some specific instances is or is not an instance of a general rule.
It’s quite nice to relate law to data science to marketing to movie watching
🙂
TINDER SWINDLER END
Simon, the antagonist, does minor time for his crimes in Israel. His victim’s are still paying for the debts he incurred. The end of the documentary shows what looks to be him defrauding women again.
And my blood again boils at the injustice of the criminal law system.
… one of the legal defence responses I remember from back in law school daze was when someone has committed an injustice.
Some lawyer would argue it’s not really an injustice because the victim should have known better and didn’t take adequate steps to protect their own interests.
That type of argument is always trotted out in commercial cases, where some Spencer notion of Survival of the Fittest would be deemed “appropriate” commercial ethical behaviour. Courts recognise different ethics govern commercial transactions between business people, as opposed to commercial transactions between you and I
Grr…