Justice & Law Quote by Eric Allman

Eric Allman’s line lands like a weary status report from someone who’s watched engineering get slowly annexed by the legal department. The blunt opener - “bad and getting worse” - isn’t rhetorical flourish; it’s a diagnosis of a system drifting toward friction as a default setting. He’s not lamenting that programmers should be ethically aware. He’s warning that the rules of the game have become so tangled that competence now includes legal navigation, not just technical skill.

The second sentence is the sharper blade: “it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.” That “as much” is intentionally outrageous, because it’s meant to feel impossible. The subtext is a critique of misaligned incentives: innovation moves iteratively, collaboratively, and often messily, while IP regimes reward ownership, defensibility, and enclosure. When those regimes sprawl - patents on broad ideas, licenses with tripwires, ambiguous claims over APIs and code reuse - the programmer’s daily work starts to resemble risk management. You’re not just solving problems; you’re scanning for land mines.

Context matters here. Allman comes out of infrastructure-level software culture, where interoperability and shared standards are oxygen. In that world, legal ambiguity isn’t an abstract policy debate; it’s downtime, chilled collaboration, projects that die in review, and small teams priced out of shipping. The quote’s intent is less “learn law” than “notice what we’re losing when building requires permission.”