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1996 U. Chi. Legal F. 207 (1996)
Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse

handle is hein.journals/uchclf1996 and id is 211 raw text is: Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse Frank H. Easterbrookt When he was dean of this law school, Gerhard Casper was proud that the University of Chicago did not offer a course in The Law of the Horse. He did not mean by this that Illinois specializes in grain rather than livestock. His point, rather, was that Law and . . . courses should be limited to subjects that could illuminate the entire law. Instead of offering courses suited to dilettantes,' the University of Chicago offered courses in Law and Economics, and Law and Literature, taught by people who could be appointed to the world's top economics and literature departments-even win the Nobel Prize in economics, as Ronald Coase has done. I regret to report that no one at this Symposium is going to win a Nobel Prize any time soon for advances in computer sci- ence. We are at risk of multidisciplinary dilettantism, or, as one of my mentors called it, the cross-sterilization of ideas. Put together two fields about which you know little and get the worst of both worlds. Well, let me be modest. I am at risk of dilettan- tism, and I suspect that I am not alone. Beliefs lawyers hold about computers, and predictions they make about new technolo- gy, are highly likely to be false. This should make us hesitate to prescribe legal adaptations for cyberspace. The blind are not good trailblazers. Dean Casper's remark had a second meaning-that the best way to learn the law applicable to specialized endeavors is to study general rules. Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on The Law of the Horse is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. Teaching 100 t Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer, The Law School, The University of Chicago. Copyright rights to this Article are with the author. [Olne finds more than a few courses in law schools entitled 'Law and _' in which the blank is indeed intellectually blank. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Re- tirement of Sheldon Messinger, 80 Cal L Rev 310 (1992).

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