I’m re-reading my article on how version control is instituted to maintain a particular version of a story against modification over time. I mentioned there that putting a story into a fixed form is one of the chief ways to do this, but I overlooked one of the best examples of that: contracts. This seems like a way to explain it that anybody can recognize easily.
Say you loan your friend a twenty bucks. Intentionally or unintentionally, your friend forgets to pay you back. One day, you go to your friend, and you say, “Hey, can I have that $20 sometime?” Maybe your friend says, “What $20?” and can’t remember the incident, or is trying to fool you so you don’t have to pay him back. This is an example of a story being modified over time. The story is your loaning money to a friend with the expectation of being paid back. The story has now been modified out of it’s original form by your friend, and now the versions of the story each of you subscribes to don’t match up with one another.
One way around this modification would be to write out a contract, or an IOU (although for $20, this seems a little over-the-top), which would establish one official version of your story into a fixed format for later reference.
The way that I’m talking about stories and version control is in a much broader cultural perspective though (more info on that). I wonder if any of the theory behind contract law actually does talk about maintaining versions of stories, or something close to that. I’ll have to look around. It’s interesting to think about law from a perspective of stories, and trying to tell a story, maintain a story or modify a story. I’d especially be interested in resources written from that perspective.
UPDATE!
My friend Mike in law school just posted some comments in regard to contract law and what it usually focuses around. I’m recording them with this post for posterity.
- Lovely. The real issue regarding contracts is interpretation… you’d be surprised how often a written contract is open to various interpretations.
When shit goes wrong, both sides look to interpret the contract in their favor and the judge is dragged in to determine from the text, what the parties intended to bind themselves to.
The arguments often deal with unclear terms but also sometimes deal with unstated intentions. Hell in some cases, contracts are considered unenforceable because the judge rules that a party couldn’t have possibly intended to bind them self to a certain promise even though the words of the contract (which they signed without being under duress) state unequivocally that they did in fact intend to be bound by the promise.
There is also the issue of audience in the contract. the contract is written for the parties, but it often affects third parties or future parties and of course, judges are a major audience that rarely ends up reading the contract, but is always foremost in the mind of the author. There are often seemingly odd provisions in contracts that seem ludicrous when you read them until you realize that they are there so that if a judge ever has to interpret the contract, he can divine what the parties intended to accomplish.
I was psyched to read these posts because I am in the middle of writing a short post on defined terms in contracts and their similarity to variable declarations in coding.
Essentially, defined terms are words that are set out at the beginning of a contract and given definitions. Throughout the contract they are then capitalized to ensure that they are understood to be defined terms.
If you defined the term “Us” “We” and “The Company” as Microsoft and then later use the word “us” in lower case, there is a chance that people interpreting the contract later will deem the lowercase use of “us” to refer to someone entirely different than Microsoft. Then, the meaning of the term (and thus the Contract) is changed.
That is a simplified example of course…
This system allows the authors to ensure (at least theoretically) that everyone reading the contract is working from a base set of assumptions, a shared context.
This is all really interesting to me. And to think about law from the perspective of people interpreting stories is so much more interesting and understandable to me now. I also am really into what Mike says above, because it supports one of the essential ideas I’m working on: that no matter how strictly people trying to maintain against it, stories are always going to be modified.
Plus, I like that Mike brought up programming. I was just doing a bunch of javascript stuff tonight for a freelance web development client. I hadn’t done any in a while, and it was difficult to get back into that mindset, but once I was there, it brought back a lot of old interesting ways of thinking. I’d like to also try and explore the concept of programming as a way to maintain against the alteration of stories. More on that some other time though.
Damn, Mike just left another comment which is absolutely fucking incredibly interesting to me:
- yeah… that’s ALL law is… remind me to send you an email about the use of precedent sometime too… essentially, each side tells a story and then points to older stories that are similar and, more importantly, have endings that match the ending they are looking to reach in the current story.
One side tries to show how their story has an identical plot to the older stories and should thus have the same ending.
The other side tries to show how the plot differs from these older stories and instead resembles a different group of older stories with different endings…
I din’t explain that well, but I have never seen anything like precedent until law school and I find the whole process fascinating.
And some more stuff from Mike. This is all so good, and is really expanding my mind into a great new area:
- hahaha… I morphed it into your language, but its better in your language… but the whole legal system is based on precedent… at least a lot of it is.
The real mind fuck is that the law actually supports the intentional modification of stories. Actually it supports their destruction.
For instance, for years people would explain how their story was identical to the story of Plessy v. Ferguson (”seperate but equal”) and argue that their story should end the same way… with segregation.
Thurgood Marhsall and his team came into court and told a new version of the story (in technicolor)… And the court liked the story and decided that Brown v. Board of Education would be the new version of the story… at some level it is a modification of the older Plessy Story, but in some ways it is really an entirely new story… the older story having been erased… I say erased because people are barred from comparing their story to the older Plessy version. They can only compare it to the New Brown version.
This is so damned sweet… I will DEFINITELY be writing about this in more detail.
More from Mike:
- One other thought I had this morning that my be of interest to you…
And that is the law of evidence. The evidence rules are fascinating from the “story perspective” because they often bar certain pieces of the story from being told. Or at least, from being included in the official “re-telling of the story”
For instance, the hearsay doctrine bars many statements made out of court from becoming part of the official story. This is due to many issues including the reliability of a statement that is not made in court under oath. But in thinking about these cases as stories, it means that there are 1) possibly huge holes in the story; and 2) evidence rules are a system each side can use to control what version of the story is told (and re-told)
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Law’s Stories
- The United States Remains In Business
- Object Contracts
- Parallel Stories in Christianity
- Canon, Apocrypha & Centralized Distribution
