Waymo v. Uber: "Meet the judge who codes — and decides tech’s biggest cases"

Judge Alsup actually has tech-nerd fanbois and fangrrrls.
From The Verge, October 19:

The Judge’s Code

On May 18th, 2012, attorneys for Oracle and Google were battling over nine lines of code in a hearing before Judge William H. Alsup of the northern district of California. The first jury trial in Oracle v. Google, the fight over whether Google had hijacked code from Oracle for its Android system, was wrapping up.

The argument centered on a function called rangeCheck. Of all the lines of code that Oracle had tested — 15 million in total — these were the only ones that were “literally” copied. Every keystroke, a perfect duplicate. It was in Oracle’s interest to play up the significance of rangeCheck as much as possible, and David Boies, Oracle’s lawyer, began to argue that Google had copied rangeCheck so that it could take Android to market more quickly. Judge Alsup was not buying it. 

“I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this trial,” said the judge. “But, I have done and still do a lot of programming myself in other languages. I have written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times or more. I could do it. You could do it. It is so simple.” 

 As counsel for Oracle tried to continue speaking, the judge only became more and more indignant.

It was an offhand comment that would snowball out of control, much to Alsup’s chagrin. It was first repeated among lawyers and legal wonks, then by tech publications. With every repetition, Alsup’s skill grew, until eventually he became “the judge who learned Java” — Alsup the programmer, the black-robed nerd hero, the 10x judge, the “master of the court and of Java.” 

Judge Alsup would like everyone to know that he doesn’t know Java. 

Not very well, anyway. He can, however, definitely code. He’s been coding in BASIC for decades, actually, writing programs for the fun of it: a program to play Bridge, written as a gift for his wife; an automatic solution for the board game Mastermind, which he is immensely fond of; and most ambitiously, a sprawling multifunctional program with a graphical interface that helps him with yet another of his many hobbies, ham radio.

His interests have served him well on the judicial bench, informing his outlook on the multibillion-dollar intellectual property cases that come to him. The fortunes of tech companies can rise or fall depending on his rulings. Oracle v. Google has wide repercussions for big companies and smaller developers alike, to say nothing of the $9 billion at stake. The yet-to-be-totaled billions Alphabet is seeking from Uber in the ongoing Waymo v. Uber suit could make or break Uber as a player in the nascent self-driving car market. 

By sheer coincidence, these major cases have wound up in the docket of maybe the one judge in America capable of understanding their technical details: a judge who can code. Alsup’s long-cherished hobby illuminated issues at the very heart of Oracle v. Google, and his off-hours tinkering with photography, lenses, and the science of light will inform him in Waymo v. Uber, a case involving LIDAR, a laser-based technology for self-driving car navigation.

The tech industry has long despaired of the law’s inability to comprehend it, making much of the legal system’s struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of progress. The belief that the law will never “catch up” to technology is borne in part of tech exceptionalism, a libertarian elitism that derides any kind of legal or regulatory impediment as Luddism. But it’s also fueled by genuine frustration with the state of law. The patent office is perceived to be rubber-stamping obvious technologies. Supreme Court justices appear befuddled by the basic process of coding. And attorneys stack juries with non-technical jurors who return massive verdicts for patents on online shopping carts.

In this landscape, Alsup is an outlier — a mystifying exception to the accepted wisdom that the law cannot make sense of the fast-changing tech industry. Alsup’s secret is simple: he’s a lifelong geek.

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Alsup is notorious among San Francisco’s attorneys for the early hours he keeps (and forces upon the lawyers who appear before him). At 9AM, most of the judges’ chambers at the federal courthouse were still dark, and doors were closed. But when I got to Alsup’s chambers, the door was flung open and the bustle inside suggested that everyone had already been at work for hours. 

A white-haired man with rectangular wire-frame glasses and a soft Southern accent, Alsup is of normal stature, but his imposing presence leaves you with the impression that he towers over you.

Alsup’s chambers have many of the classic aesthetics of the legal profession: the shelves upon shelves of leather-bound books, the stained wood paneling, a small black-and-white portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging over an intimidatingly large desk. Off to the side sits a sofa strewn with dog toys. Alsup’s Jack Russell Terrier, who he often brings to work, was not at the office that day.

The judge sat me down on the sofa and walked me through his programs on a 2011 court-issued Dell laptop. He couldn’t run the same programs on his desktop computer, he said with some irritation, so the Dell was here to stay. “It’s the last one that will support QuickBASIC, which is kind of a shame, because it’s the only language I really know.”

The judge is not a hardware fanatic. He uses computers and whatever smartphone the court has provided him with. He has a court-issued iPhone, but if the Northern District of California issued him an Android, he’d use an Android, he said. 

I asked him if I could put his code on GitHub, and he asked me what GitHub was. In lieu of that, he handed me printouts of his computer programs, three stacks of paper that had been neatly stapled at the corners. The one on the top, he apologized, had several dependencies that he hadn’t had the time to print out. Long before he became the judge presiding over Silicon Valley, Alsup had been a hobbyist operating in isolation; he’s a geek, but he’s a geek from another era....MUCH MORE

Previously: 

"Judge Alsup Wants Uber & Waymo To Teach Him How To LiDAR Prior To Self-Driving Car Case" 

Double Hit To Uber: Judge Alsup Denies Uber’s Request for Stay, Gives Waymo Fatherly Advice; Magistrate Judge Corley Approves Waymo Request to Peek at Dirty Laundry

  

Uber: Do NOT Piss Off The Federal Judge Hearing Your Case

...MoFo lawyer Arturo Gonzalez told Alsup that complying with court orders to turn over information to Waymo, protecting Uber’s confidentiality, and not stepping on Levandowski’s rights is akin to navigating a “minefield.” Gonzalez noted that Levandowski -- but not Uber -- appealed Alsup’s ruling requiring Uber to turn over a report containing key evidence in the case....MORE 

MoFo lawyer?

This is the third time the mofo's have dissed Judge Alsup:

May 12
Uber Suffers Legal Setbacks In Europe, U.S.

In the Waymo case Uber's bid to make their arguments in private was turned down by the judge overseeing the action but even worse for Levandowski, hizzoner is using his Federal Judgeship powers.*

April 1
Uber: Judge Says He May Grant Waymo's Request For An Injunction Against Uber's Self Driving Efforts

I was going to put something together on Anthony Levandowski's use of the 5th amendment in a civil matter and some of the implications of doing so but didn't get to it. In the meantime here is a look at some high-buck lawyering and tactics of litigators...

I was thinking more along the lines of inferring guilt--in a criminal proceeding an inference from the assertion of the 5th amendment right is strictly verboten and judges so instruct the jury, whereas in most state courts (California being a notable exception) and U.S. federal court,  a civil pleading of the 5th may be assumed to be an admission of guilt.

But yeah, another implication is: if you piss off a tech savvy* federal judge you've got a problem....

And many more. Use the search blog box, keyword Waymo, if interested.