Thursday, July 28, 2016

Fitting square pegs into bicycles

To this non-lawyer, jurisprudence often seems to be metaphor mongering/mangling/wrangling -- as in Judge Easterbrook's contention that that there was no more a “law of cyberspace” than there was a “Law of the Horse" ("Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse" (1996); see also Larry Lessig's "The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach").

From a recent CS Monitor comes the latest in this inexhaustible genre: "Is bitcoin money? Are Airbnbs hotels? Why courts have trouble deciding."