Interlude - Index of

98 | Turbulent Adolescence
My new slogan: Success breeds litigation.
I have a new respect for the lawyers’ point of view. Sometimes
what matters most is getting to a conclusion so that
everyone can move on.
Suppose you accidentally bought a stolen TV. Let’s say
you bought it at a reputable store, so it’s not like you went to
a bad part of town and got 80 percent off from a guy selling
stuff from the back of his van. A year later, the original owner
somehow finds you, and he wants his TV. You didn’t do anything
wrong, so you think the old owner should leave you
alone and go hunt down whoever stole it. But he argues that
he didn’t do anything wrong either, and since the TV was his
first, he wants it back.
As a society we need a process to determine who gets the
TV so that both sides can move on with their lives. Laws are
not necessarily about right and wrong. Laws are simply the
operating system of the country.
That’s all fine for this example, where neither person did
anything wrong, but what if your moral intuition says one
person was good and the other person evil. Then shouldn’t
you worry about right and wrong? The lawyer’s response is,
“That’s not my job. Congress passes the laws. As a lawyer, I
only care what the law actually says.”
To put it in computer terms, Congress is the programmer,
laws are the program, and the courtroom—lawyers, judge, and
jury—are the computer that runs the program. Blame Microsoft
for that blue screen, not Dell. This analogy convinced me
that the problem is Congress and not the lawyers.
Still, I think it’s wrong if nobody worries about “moral
bugs” in the legal code. It may not be the lawyer’s job, but if