Message-ID: <19991213034534.AAC3746@jubilee.ns.sympatico.ca@LOCALNAME> Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 21:18:54 -04 From: Kerry Miller <mailto:kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca> Subject: Lessig on Codes of Ethics To: mailto:DEVEL-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace Lawrence Lessig Basic Books, 1999
"[In many cases, the U.S.] Constitution yields no answer to the question of how it should be applied, because at least two answers are possible --that is, in light of the choices that the framers actually made.
"For Americans, this ambiguity creates a problem. If we lived in an era when courts felt entitled to select the answer that in the context made the most sense, there would be no problem. Latent ambiguities would be answered by choices made by judges -- the framers could have gone either way, but we choose to go this way.
"But we don't live in such an era, and so we don't have a way for courts to resolve these ambiguities. As a result, we must rely on other institutions. My claim, a dark one, is that we have no such institutions. If our ways don't change, our constitution in cyberspace will be a thinner and thinner regime.
"Cyberspace will present us with ambiguities over and over again. It will press this question of how best to go on. We have tools from real space that will help resolve the interpretive questions by pointing us in one direction or another, at least some of the time. But in the end the tools will guide us even less than they do in real space and time. When the gap between their guidance and what we do becomes obvious, we will be forced to do something we are not very good at doing -- deciding what we want and what is right."
(More excerpts at http://www.cookreport.com/lessigbook.shtml )