I thought about this sequence of comments seriously for quite a while. I accept that "grandpa judge" was inappropriate. But how would you phrase the problem of our judges not understanding technology? Is it a judge thing? Lawyers understand. But lawyer tend to be younger. There are few young judges. I think age, and the lack of life experience with tech because they grew up before it, probably is the factor that matters here.
>Lawyers understand. But lawyer tend to be younger.
Lawyers also tend to be specialists to a greater degree than judges. I know quite a few IP/technology licensing/etc. lawyers who are very technically knowledgeable and many of them are not especially young.
But it's what they do for a living. And I'm pretty sure I'll pick one of them to help me out on most technology-related matters rather than a random 30 year old criminal defense lawyer.
Judges tend to be much more generalists. They have to rule on all sorts of arcane points of law which they probably haven't made a career out of studying. But some of them are pretty astute on matters of technology (and at higher levels of the court, they have clerks too.) Look at Judge Alsup in the Oracle-Google case https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl... or Judge Kimball in the SCO case.
Actually, few do. However you can choose your lawyer, and therefore pick one well-versed in the relevant area of technology and who also has a network of expert witnesses and advisors.
I appreciate this more thoughtful response, but bear in mind that it is the role of domain experts to (hopefully) clarify complicated matters for those on the outside, whatever their demographic background.
Age has positives and negatives associated with it, and ascribing only the latter to it with regard to judges and technology would mean we should set an upper age limit to all court proceedings dealing with any complicated subject - technology is hardly unique in that respect.
There might be an argument for that (or at least some competency test beyond a certain advanced age), but not in the crass, prejudiced way implied in the OP.
>I appreciate this more thoughtful response, but bear in mind that it is the role of domain experts to (hopefully) clarify complicated matters for those on the outside, whatever their demographic background.
I'm familiar with one particular subset of the SCO case. Suffice it to say that a great deal of legal and expert witness time (from both sides) went into creating detailed reports that were intended to be consumed by a non-specialist that laid out history, discussed various claims, and so forth.
A judge could of course choose not to spend the time and effort to digest all this information--but that would be the case whether you're talking technology contract and IP claims or you're talking some complicated and arcane case of real estate contracts.
