Tears For Fears - Woman In Chains

January 19, 2022

They were playing this in Rex Pizza a few minutes ago, ...

And I had an idea for David Gilmour's LA Law firm ... See David Gilmour - Who By Fire (Leonard Cohen):

It's that you find lots of common abstract structure in disputes over assets and liabilities. For example, say someone sent a computer to the child of a family who were running an hotel, intending it to be used by a guest staying there and that they kept it because the child was clearly benefitting from the use of the machine. But the guest was hamstrung for lack of a computer, so he had to write crap like this in a message on his phone. Well, what if he learned something important by having been so inconvenienced. What happened is that he remembered giving a computer and a phone to young girl in whose house he once lived, and who inspired him with her skills at using a broom to move large quantities of water around the concrete floor of the house in which they lived. She gave him an image so beautiful that he will never forget it, or her.

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These two cases have some common abstract structure, and rather than deciding the actual amount of money owed by the defendent to the plaintiff, the abstract structures (combinators) were combined together into a super-combinator and with placeholders for the assets and liabilities and that structure could itself be used as the value of a placeholder (called the arguments to the function). For example, see https://prooftoys.org/ian-grant/hm/

Once resolved in this abstract way, the computation of the actual concrete values of the arguments could be deferred indefinitely, until all the kids in the world could learn to play guitar better than David Gilmour or Chris Rea if necessary! So to practice law effectively you don't actually need to watch more than the first episode of Paper Chase, do you?