Tram Town
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
| Category: Quote From Paul Sheehan's astoundingly depressing book Girls Like You: The payment of lawyers on a time basis does not provide an incentive for the efficient conduct of trials. And finally, efforts to reform the litigation system have systematically been sabotaged and wrecked by lawyers. [As Napoleon said, the administration of justice is too important to be left to lawyers.]Even in a legal system where the overwhelmingly most significant influence was the desire for justice, lawyers' payments would naturally sway process in favour of a more time-consuming procedure. BTW (and off on a completely orthoganol topic), that attribution to Napoleon (which was not in the Sheehan book but was in the original aritcle in the SMH) was interesting to me because it was later paraphrased by Robert R. Coveyou as: The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chanceI'd thought I'd first seen that in Knuth's Semi-numerical Algorithms but when I went to the dead tree archive I couldn't find it (though Coveyou is referenced many times throughout the book). I did however find the following attributed to Knuth: Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at randomThe dead tree archive is a bit of a pain because there is no search button. Add to that the disastrous fonts in TeX and you have a very squinting Semi. |
