How would Lawyers/Those who studied law explain this?

[Femusia]

I would appreciate answers from lawyers/those who have studied law/those familiar with it.

I know this might be a bit of a silly question, but it’s something I’ve wondered for a long time.

So, in the UK if you’re a lawyer, you’re obviously familiar with how the law works. But, is the law you know about specifically tailored to the UK or is it a more generic thing meaning you know about the basic legal principles/philosophical aspects of law that can apply anywhere?

Like for instance, in Australia and the UK murder are both seen as wrong but they might have different sentencing guidelines or different interpretations of certain legal cases. Or, in UK and Germany, land theft is wrong but the specific laws around it are different in terms of penalties and interpretations.

So, if you’re a lawyer practising in the UK and/or studied law in the UK does that mean you’re only familiar with law from a UK perspective and the law you studied in terms of the facts and points could easily be seen as wrong or irrelevant somewhere else?

Does that mean you’re always paying attention to changes in the law? For instance, I know EU Law is taught at university. But, imagine if the EU collapses, then what happens to taught EU law or the EU law you learnt? Wouldn’t it be useless?

Imagine the EU decides to dramatically transform its structures and laws. Would the teaching immediately change to reflect that and wouldn’t what you learnt be redundant?

What happens if hypothetically the UK is invaded and the conquerors change all the laws but are benign so they aren’t killing everyone, they’ve just changed the rules so the UK constitutional law structure is changed ie no more Parliament or Supreme Court and different types of employment and human rights law in terms of legislation passed. Ie if you’re an employment rights lawyer, you might reference the Equality Act or if you’re a corporate or commercial lawyer you might reference some Act like The Consumer Act. But, if all of those things are radically changed, would you still know what to do?

Would you still be able to practice law in the sense the fundamental philosophical aspects are the same or not because the specifically British things you learnt about would no longer exist?

Have you been drinking?

I'll bite..

Former criminal barrister now work in different area of law..

No Lawyer knows all the law. Yes you are taught law at university but more fundamentally you are taught the skills to be a lawyer. Reading. Interpreting. Research. Advocacy.

The area of law I work in now is quite niche and wasnt taught at university. But I am good at it because of the skills of being a lawyer not the memorisation of law.

If we were invaded tomorrow and a new set of laws was imposed overnight.. pretty much any lawyer could look up, read, interpret and apply the new rules but not because of a philosophical alignment in legal principles, just the use and application of legal skills.

That’s really tickled me 😁

These are questions for AI, not Mumsnet.

We used to learn EU as a uni module but now not part of EU I imagine law degree is only uk law. Commonwealth countries often have v similar laws. Most law degree students in UK end up practicing in UK as solicitor or barrister.

the rest of the question is hypothetical garbage.

English law is practiced in some other countries but not others. Often a lawyer who trained in another country is not familiar with English law and cannot necessarily practice here. Then there’s case law and various other directives which form how law is administered. There are numerous facets to law within the main branches that are taught at uni or on the GDL. So no one can possibly know everything! So you won’t get the same barristers defending someone accused of murder as you would advocating for Prince Harry against the Daily Mail.

This is so bleak. OP wants to have a chat with humans, not with AI. No one’s making you reply.

I’m a lawyer and change roles and areas of law frequently. There’s a depth v breadth argument but it can certainly be advantageous to have broad understanding of lots of different areas, both the substantive law but also generally how things operate in that field. It’s useful for wider view on how everything fits together. As per Moose above, no one person knows all the law, usually what you’re looking for is a set of skills and approaches to work, and any decent lawyer should be able to get to grips with different areas quickly. Broadly speaking you can look at institutional writers say, look at relevant legislation, cases where that legislation is discussed, scan a chapter of a textbook etc. We have specialist legal research websites like Westlaw where we can identify and look through all of those relatively quickly. Law changes all the time, either Brexit, new legislation or precedent can have taken a wrong turn for several decades and then a judgment will declare it has always been something else etc. obviously in government roles you’re changing or making new law. On the Australia point specifically it is different but when there’s no clear precedent within the UK we’ll look for guidance from another country in the UK or a country with a similar legal system and so can sometimes end up citing Australian law. So a legal career is itself a career in research really.

The law isn’t static. It changes all the time and part of what you are taught at university is how to get up to speed with new law when you need to. So for example when GDPR became law, lawyers had to become familiar with rules of privacy which just didn’t exist beforehand or only in very limited forms. Same with rules around the use of AI.

some countries legal systems are very similar - if they are based for example on the common law system - and it will be easier to assimilate the law in a similar jurisdiction but you won’t be qualified to advise in that country you will just have a decent lay person’s understanding. But if the country has a reciprocal arrangement with the UK, you might be able to qualify there by studying for a much shorter time (by doing a conversion course).

@Atthisit is hardly that different chatting with AI vs. chatting with us, except AI is more intelligent and will give more comprehensive, helpful answers.

It's text prediction. It's probably more intelligent than people who don't realise that, but not so much compared with the rest of us

The idea that because it's 'done by a computer' it's somehow got some secret knowledge makes some people lose all common sense. It was telling me that a Friday was a Saturday not that long ago!

I am in a profession that is akin to being a lawyer for a handful of particular regulations.

In my area, the law that applies in the UK originates from EU directives and also from international expert bodies. They constantly review the knowledge about our area of work and provide guidance about what the law in any particular country should require businesses who fall under these (environmental and Health and Safety) regulations to do to protect people and the environment due to their work.

As an aside, when the previous government tried to repeal all EU legislation, they found that this was an impossible task because of the enormous amount of work required and that it would lead to the collapse of society, so the idea was quietly dropped. But now the UK is no longer in the EU, we are no longer required to implement EU directives. But we do have lots of regulations that stem from the EU and these will remain in place until repealed or if the country wants to amend the regulations, they're free to do in a way that they see fit. But it could still lead to pretty much the same outcome, because in my area at least, the EU took the lead from the international expert bodies and it is likely that the UK would still follow the international requirements as do Australia, Canada and other countries outside the EU.

In order to do my job I have to demonstrate to our professional body that I am knowledgeable about these regulations and I continue to work in my field. This means that I am only qualified to work in the UK and if I wanted to do the same job in another country, I would need to obtain a similar registration in that country. I would probably be able to do this fairly quickly because the requirements are all broadly the same because most countries in the world look to the international expert bodies when setting their regulations. But I'd need to be aware of the differences because there are requirements that are slightly different or different terms are used.

There are places where there are no regulations or they're not very detailed, which I have experience of working in but because they have links to the UK. Instead of writing all their own regulations for situations that might never arise, because they're very small countries with very small populations (this is for many laws, not just the area where I work), they just write a very basic law with associated good practice guidance that states that UK law can be used to illustrate what the requirements are and a regulator in that country can refer to UK law when deciding whether a business has committed an offence there.

As for paying attention to changes in the law, yes we do this in my profession, as experts we also contribute to changes in the regulations, eg look for where changes are required due to new technologies or updated information and comment on draft regulations if we see areas that wouldn't work in practice. Thankfully these don't happen too often because it generates a lot of work.

One thing that always fascinates me is that there are areas of the world where a particular place has been part of different countries over the years. So how that would work when the country you are in changes? I know that this has often been horrific due to a war situation but just practical day to day stuff. Things like what taxes you pay and to which government, where your car is registered and how this switches over, that sort of thing when one day you live in country X and then due to political changes, suddenly you're a citizen of country Y.

@CleverlyBeerydescribing LMLs as “text prediction” really displays a simplistic view of how they work.

It's a simplistic description, obviously. That was intended.

You don't know my view on how they work, because I haven't written that here, and describing vector spaces amd retrieval-augmentation in detail would be a waste of my time.

@CleverlyBeery”my view”. LOL. How they work isn’t a matter of opinion.

I think it's an interesting topic of conversation. Why can't people use Mumsnet to raise engaging questions and ask, with sincerity, to hear from people who know better than them on the subject?

You don't have to comment on any thread, if you feel so strongly that they are irrelevant.

If you thought that I was claiming that how LLMs work is a matter of opinion, you misunderstood.

You were talking about my 'view of how they work' in your comment, remember? You brought up that term; I was responding to it.

I thought ‘asking AI’ for clarification on points of law had already thrown up some fairly notorious problems?

There's a database somewhere that keeps track of actual or suspected fabrications by use of AI in cases. It's a really bad idea - it has sort of replaced search engines, as search engines become unusable in their job of "finding where it says XYZ online", but people still expect that if the AI results tell you about something, that thing exists online somewhere. When you try and check sources it's not uncommon for it to be non-existent, lacking essential detail or totally misrepresented.