[etherael]

Lawyers have this habit that they share with coders, when they are consulted as to why the system is behaving in a certain way, they treat it in an exercise in debugging legislature, and tracing the path of execution of case through the legal system, much like a coder will debug a program, and trace the path of execution through the computer, and the various methods and decision trees in the source.

The difference is though, when a coder finds out why the program is doing what the user doesn't want it to do, he will say "See, there you go, we can fix it now" where the lawyer will say "See, there you go, it turns out you're in the wrong because the law says so", the deeper embedded in the fabric of the legal profession they are the harder it seems to be for them to consider the possibility that although it's the law, it can still be utterly and completely wrong.