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SUMMARY:Law as Engineering - Mr David Howarth\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20140506T150000Z
DTEND:20140506T160000Z
UID:TALK51336@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Nathan Crilly
DESCRIPTION:In 'Law as Engineering' (2013) I attempted to describe what la
 wyers do in terms of their design activities. The popular conception of la
 wyering is that it exclusively concerns litigation\, especially in the cri
 minal courts\, but most of the time most lawyers are engaged in a quite di
 fferent activity - they are designing devices for clients: contracts\, tru
 sts\, companies\, wills\, conveyances and so on. Lawyers working for the s
 tate are also mainly employed as designers\, in their case additionally of
  regulations\, statutes\, constitutions and treaties. The basic pattern is
  the same as in any design activity. The lawyer\, as a designer\, needs to
  elicit what the client wants and what constraints the client is working t
 o\, but also has to bring the client to understand what it is possible and
  not possible to achieve. The lawyer then generates options for achieving 
 the client's objectives within the constraints and looks for the best solu
 tion available.\n\nLawyers\, like all designers\, need to understand the p
 roperties of the materials and the forces they work with - in their case l
 egal rules - which\, crucially\, includes understanding their limitations.
  Similarly\, lawyers\, like all designers\, use characteristic design proc
 esses\, in their case most notably the preservation and re-use of patterns
  and combinations of rules that seem to be effective. But I was intrigued 
 by a comparison between engineering design and legal design\, which seemed
  to point to a number of deficiencies in how lawyers characteristically ap
 proached finding design solutions\, especially a failure to generate more 
 than a very few options - sometimes only one - and a related tendency to s
 tart from old solutions rather than from an abstract understanding of the 
 problem (although it turned out the designers of UK statutes\, the Office 
 of Parliamentary Counsel\, have been taking counter-measures against this 
 tendency for many years). It also seemed to me that if lawyers were to tak
 e a more systems engineering approach to their design work\, a number of a
 dvantages would flow\, especially in understanding how legal devices go wr
 ong.\n\nI have now embarked on several follow-up projects. In one\, funded
  by the AHRC\, I am asking whether it is possible to compile a comprehensi
 ve catalogue of legal rules\, alongside their known effects and limitation
 s\, possibly to the extent of being able to put together a form of pattern
  language for the design of statutes. In another\, I am asking how the con
 ception of law as a form of engineering design might be applied to fields 
 of law to which it does not obviously apply - especially the litigation do
 minated field of civil liability in which much of the law arises from the 
 decisions of judges. Judges seem to face very big obstacles to being able 
 to design well. They are in a poor position to see the system as a whole a
 nd it is very unclear who their clients are."\n\n---\n\nDavid Howarth is R
 eader in Law and Director of the MPhil in Public Policy in the University 
 of Cambridge. He works in three departments - Law\, Politics and Internati
 onal Studies and Land Economy. His interests were originally in civil liab
 ility law\, about which he wrote a prize-winning book\, but he was diverte
 d into thinking about design after being commissioned to write a journal a
 rticle about whether legal studies should be classified as part of the hum
 anities\, which led him to the thought that law was more like engineering 
 than history. After an interlude in public life\, he developed that though
 t into a book\, 'Law as Engineering: Thinking about what lawyers do' (2013
 ). 
LOCATION:Sir Arthur Marshall Room\, Inglis Bldg\, Engineering dept.\, Trum
 pington Street
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