Nilay Patel

Yep.

The reason I'm starting here with your previous experience and not your current job is I encounter this on our show and on our site all the time that people think the legal system is deterministically.

Like particularly our audience, the tech audience, thinks the legal system is a computer, right?

You can feed it inputs and it'll API access the law and then you'll get some predictable outputs.

And I'm always trying to convince people that that's not the case.

And just even hearing you talk about the politics of running the legal system underlines for me that the legal system is absolutely not deterministic.

Should it be?

Because you're the first person I could just like straightforwardly ask that question to.

Should the legal system be more predictable and deterministic?

Where do you think the sort of source of uncertainty in the legal system as people experience it today comes from?

Is it just that most people can't afford a lawyer?

Is it that some percentage of judges are just weird old guys?

Where does that come from?

That rate of reversal, just to unpack that, what you mean is someone goes to court, a state court judge decides there's an appeal, which costs money, and that goes up to an appeals court, and the appeals court is overturning that judge.

And you're saying that rate's going up or that rate is too high.

The reason I'm starting here is, I think you perceive this as well as I do, the lack of faith and trust in our institutions is kind of pervasive across American society.

And the legal system is just part of it now, right?

Like, especially if you show up and you don't have a lawyer, you don't have the money, and then it is a weird old guy and a judge, and then you're looking at the statistics and they're probably wrong, but you can't afford to appeal, or you're just reading the headlines every day.

It just feels like there's more chaos in the formal legal system

than ever.