Teaching judges about computers

Ed Felten thinks the time has come to send judges to computer science lessons.

"One of the tenets of the law and economics movement is that decisions about legal regulation of economic behavior should be grounded in a deep understanding of economics. Sound economics can predict the effect of proposed legal rules; but bad economics leads to bad law...

What is true of economics is equally true of computer science. Only by understanding computer science can we predict the impact of proposed regulations of technology. As we have seen so many times, bad computer science leads to bad law...

One criticism of law and economics is that it works well in a seminar room but may lead to dangerous overconfidence if applied to a hard case by an overworked, generalist judge. One solution is to teach judges more economics, and economic seminars for judges have proliferated. Perhaps the time has come to run seminars in computer science for judges."