Investing In Lawsuits Beats the Street 203
guga31bb sends word on the next wave of investment in a slow market: bankrolling others' lawsuits. The practice sounds on the face of it indistinguishable from champerty. "Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company's backers, but said that 'on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.' He added, 'We're certainly beating the market.'"
Patents on software... (Score:5, Informative)
It relates because the business of software patents is very close to this. Patent litigation in the software sector is much higher than in any other sector and much of that litigation is speculative and funded by exactly the kind of VC TFA is talking about.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Informative)
Umm.. by "here" do you mean New Jersey? Cause that's the only place in the US that doesn't consider champertous contracts illegal (Bigelow v. Old Dominion Copper Mining & Smelting Co.)
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:3, Informative)
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch. 3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone. [...] 5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
These three, at least. are already the case in the US, at both federal and state level. Your second 3 is not yet implemented by all counties and municipalities, but they're getting there. As for your first 3, while changes in statutes are passed as "diffs" by the legislature, generally, the patches are applied after they're passed, and the up-to-date version of the law includes a footnote that it was changed and on what date, but the text you read is the "patched-up" version.
I do think it would be very cool if legislators adopted source code management tools to manage the legal code. I think it would work very well, and would make the whole process much more visible to everyone. Imagine github for the legal code!
Hmm... Maybe I should download my state laws and publish them via github. Hmm.
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:2, Informative)
Jurily, you should learn more about our legal system. It is the product of 2000 years of the best legal minds of our civilization.
1. You cannot abolish precedent. First, they are not made by "morons". Second, most precedent is recent. The courts have a heirarchy. Lower courts must follow upper courts, and the same court must follow its past decisions interpreting the same law before it.
2. The legislature does hire competent attorneys to write the actual text of the laws, and they do aim for clarity and precision.
3. All changes to statutes are incorporated into the text. However, not all situations are covered by the text, which is why we have judges to interpret the law to apply to specific situations. Not all specific situations are the same which is why it appears to be a patchwork of precedents. Courts can only interpret the law for the specific fact patterns that come before it.
3. (sic) The text is easily accessible and searchable by anyone. See Findlaw.com.
4. This is the purpose of Courts interpreting the law. For instance, does free speech apply to the internet? Under your rule, the answer would be "no", since there was no internet with the Constitution was written.
5. Agreed.