A Caveat About Nuance

(Again, Still, Always)

Just a lawyerly caveat before we begin (I know, I know, I can hear the moaning and groaning already, but hear me out) — and I know some of you have heard this before in a Tweet-thread version, but I’m going to say it again here on Substack anyway.

Law is a complex and sprawling thing and in almost every way (both inherently and intentionally) resists simplification. IMO, you can see this is the recent trend toward the reductive belief that “code” could be law. It’s the fever dream of the DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

The idea that laws governing human beings could be reduced to code is perhaps a brilliant aspirational notion — something to aim for, perhaps, in a teleological sense, to hit only asymptotically, if ever, lest we turn humans into robots in the process. So what do we do in the meanwhile?

The fact is that human life here and now is messy, complicated, and almost infinitely nuanced — and law is the attempt to weave together all of those loose and often-fraying strands, that connect our human lives together in society, into a coherent fabric. It’s an intricate process, full of detail and depth — all of which defies neat summary in a one-off podcast interview without doing some violence to the complexity of the issues.

You have probably heard by now that the Court of Chancery is a court of equity not a court of law. Equitable judging still requires an individual craftsman to analyze the facts, apply the ancient principles, carve the specific remedy and communicate the result. The product is human art; it cannot be scientifically produced. 

So, you will likely hear me talk a lot about nuance — explicitly or inherently — because it’s the reason that I feel such an affinity for law. I love nuance, detail, complexity of things. And in law, it’s nuance all the way down.

It’s also simply a fact that law is an adversarial process, by its own nature. That means that there are always—at the very minimum—two sides to every story, and many more interpretations of the story than that. For almost anything that I say on Twitter, or Substack, or a podcast (or ever, wherever, amen…), there will be people who agree and people who disagree, to all the varying degrees.