Lawyers to be replaced with computers

Due to various miscalculations, lack of internet access and alien abductions on her US trip, Ruthie is finally checking in from Detroit airport during an 8 hour stopover.

Ruthie finds that airtravel is conducive to deep thought, given there is little else to do for eight hours crushed into a space the size of a badger’s latrine and about as fragrant. Sadly, until she marries Dan she is obliged to travel cattle class, with the attendant literary pleasures of the skymall catalogue and safety card and in the event of ultimate desperation reduced to scrutinising the instructions on the vomit bag. (N.B if you are sick on an aircraft they are obliged to analyse your spew to ensure it was nothing to do with the food. As a airsickness sufferer Ruthie is always tempted to adulterate her offerings with bizarre substances just to cause temporary panic in the lab and the boardroom.)

 Ruthie notes on her travels that America delights in stating the bleeding obvious e.g. Coffee “beware, hot!” Motorcyles - “wear helmet before riding”. For a while Ruthie thought that perhaps this was because Americans are particularly stupid, until she discovered that America has more lawyers per head of population than any other country in the world, and they all need to make a living somehow.

But the greatest mystery of all is the visa waiver system. Ruthie wonders whether anyone actually answers “yes” when required to indicate whether they have a comunicable illness or have participated in genocide. If you answer in the affirmative you are required to “report to the embassy in your home country before travelling to the States as you may be denied entry.” Tricky, since you are given the form when you are already on the plane. Do they turn around and go back? Or is that the true purpose of the overwing exits? And what does the 4 minute “burden” of reading the form mean? Did they include people who do not speak English as their first language when making the calculation? Is the burden simply the time to read, or also the time to comprehend? If so, what percentage of Americans could actually define genocide if asked?

Whilst crushed between an obese texan and the lavatory door, Ruthie devised an answer to the prison overcrowding problem; strap all the inmates onto transatlantic flights. The incarceration experience on a plane is not dissimilar to one of her majesty’s hotels; one is strapped into a confined space for lengthy periods, forced to share one’s personal space with a complete stranger, given crap food with plastic utensils in case you become violent, and provided with permanent TV. Strapping prisoners onto flights would also save a lot of money on security; one is hardly going to make a break for it at 30,000 feet. Flying over sympathetic countries with dubious regimes would also allow us to ignore basic human rights, which would offset the cost of the petrol. In fact, amazing no country has already thought of trying it..

Having extracted the fluff from her own navel and having commenced inspecting her neighbour’s, Ruthie was spared from death of terminal boredom by a weekend copy of the FT which she finds is invariably a more interesting read than the Saturday Times, almost as though all the journalists having spent the week analysing stock options are grateful to be given the chance to write about poetry, and therefore make an extra special effort.

Law is of course a highly skilled science, requiring vast intellect and wisdom to balance the almost infinite variables in each case. This is of course why lawyers are generally so well paid. Ruthie was thefore disconcerted to discover that two political scientists, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn, had developed a computer programme which would acurately predict how US Supreme Court Justices would vote. The computer was duly pitted against a panel of experts, the experts managing a miserable 59.1% against the computer’s 75%. Prediction programmes have proved so effective they are being used by parole boards to calculate the risk of re-offending.

Ruthie’s momma always advised her the pursuit of the profession of law was a guaranteed way to avoid being outskilled by a computer. But when Microsoft has the monopoly even on the exercise of judicial discretion, there will be no alternative for Ruthie to make a living than by pimping out her co-blogger.