David Allen Green

David Allen Green is a great commentator on law in the UK. During the Brexit period, he was a contributing editor to the Financial Times, with similarly insightful analyses of how Boris Johnson et al were misusing the government's legal powers.

Anyway, David also posted this to his non-gated "The Law and Policy Blog" at [1].

[1] https://davidallengreen.com/2023/09/computer-says-guilty-an-introduction-to-the-evidential-presumption-that-computers-are-operating-correctly/

There are more comments there, including this one from me (written for his blog's legal/non-technical audience, not for the HN crowd!):

"There has been a big shift in the practice of computer programming in the last 25 years. In the “old days”, software was delivered on floppy disks or tape, and pretty much had to be correct first time.

Nowadays, everything is on the web, “agile” means the functionality gets delivered incrementally in 2-week sprints. It is regarded as ok to leave out the difficult cases or ship bugs, provided they don’t affect too many users too much of the time. In other words, the software is never really finished.

With that in mind, it becomes simple to rebut the presumption of correctness: if the company’s tech organisation describes itself as “agile”, using “scrum” etc, its software – by design – contains bugs and omissions, both known and unknown.

Fortunately, modern development practices means evidence for this will be in the dev tickets in GitHub, Azure DevOps or whatever other…

Yes, it looks like you're quite right. Thanks for correcting me!

I've confirmed it with several sources, from several different legal systems:

> The rule is not concerned with the duration of interests. A lease for 999
years does not violate the rule; nor does an estate in fee simple, which may
last for ever. The rule is satisfied if an interest must 'vest' within the per-
petuity period, even though the interest may last beyond it. - http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MelbULawRw/1969/19.pdf

> Although a lease may be given for an unlimited term or even in perpetuity, the reversion is clearly not obnoxious to the rule, since it is a vested interest. - in LEASES AND THE RULE AGAINST PERPETUITIES, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/11382/69_27YaleLJ878_1917_1918_.pdf?sequence=2 (there are many concepts and words I don't understand)

> It’s not related to the rule against perpetutities at all. The rule deals with interests in proprerty which are floating around in a trust, waiting to be vested in someone. They can only float around unvested like this if the terms of the trust require that the must vest in someone within the perpetutity period. - https://davidallengreen.com/2023/03/happily-ever-after-disney-and-the-rule-against-perpetuties/

I was particularly happy about a comment in that last link: "When I was a law student I think I understood the rule against perpetuitities for about an hour – luckily that coincided with my exams."

I’m Curious about this too actually.

The closest “easy” thing would be a statutory claim I think.

But you can’t make it if the debt is over 6 years old.

https://www.gov.uk/statutory-demands

It appears you can sue for the return of property in civil court.

https://www.askthe.police.uk/view-category/?id=2ec7e112-6ad2-eb11-bacb-000d3ad61986

I’m Sure though there’s complexity that make all of that not relevant if it’s a country suing.

Usually international treaty comes into place when things are international.

However, some interesting cases against the British museum.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/a-uk-heritage-group-will-sue-british-museum-over-access-to-long-disputed-parthenon-marbles-1234623180/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/world/europe/greece-british-museum-elgin-marbles.html

There’s a whole book on this dispute from a litigator.

https://www.elginism.com/elgin-marbles/why-dont-we-just-sue-the-british-museum-a-litigators-perspective-on-the-elgin-marbles-debate/20121114/6713/

And the British museum policy on giving back objects. https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2019-10/De-accession_Policy_Nov2018.pdf

Finally, it looks like The government may be preventing this. They may have been acted upon in 2005?

And also https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2022/10/government-delays-bill-allowing-nationals-to-return-items-on-moral-grounds/

However, this may answer all your…

The Post Office knew that the Horizon system was deeply flawed and that the prosecutions they were pursuing were unsound. They intentionally covered up this fact. The courts adjudicated based on evidence provided by the Post Office, but that evidence intentionally omitted things like error logs that would have undermined their case. The defendants had a right to see that evidence, but the Post Office simply denied that it existed. The Post Office were helped by the fact that the rules of evidence presume that computer records are accurate unless shown otherwise - the burden was on the defence to show that Horizon was flawed, not on the Post Office to show that it was reliable.

Lots of things had to go wrong for this miscarriage of justice to happen, but at the core of it all is the fact that the Post Office lied for years - to the defendants, to the courts, to the media, to government. Things should have been handled differently, the case has revealed a number of systematic failings that need to be urgently addressed, but there's only so much the legal system can do to defend against very sophisticated people who engage in a determined campaign of deceit. We can reduce the risk of something like this happening again, but sadly we can't eliminate that risk…

> was the one jailed for her comments

The one that fanned huge fucking protests, the one that caused a massive spike in violence, many hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage? That old poor innocent councillors wife?

Britain and the US are very different. In the same way that a lot of americans think that school shootings are a fair exchange for second amendment rights, this is a fair exchange for not having shitstirring fucks whip up tensions.

Look, you're not going to be convinced by any of this, because of where (I assume) you grew up. But think of it this way, how many of those constitutional protections Americans have now, have been broken by the current executive branch of the USA? what practical constitutional checks and balances have actually worked when they are being tested?

The 6th amendment appears to not hold with anyone who ICE touches. Personally I'd be much more excised about the USA right now, given that it cant even practice what it's currently trying to preach.

Also, if you want analysis of why Connolly got that sentence: https://davidallengreen.com/2025/05/explaining-a-31-month-sentence-for-a-tweet/

UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights and often express their desire to circumvent it (see the linked Guardian article in another comment), or to remove its applicability from UK law altogether.

Supporters of human rights may find comfort in the fact that the UK is actually bound to the ECHR by various international agreements, including the Good Friday Agreement. This severely limits politicians' ability to scrap its applicability altogether, despite their repeated promises to the contrary. This excellent blog post from June summarizes all this well: https://davidallengreen.com/2022/06/oh-no-not-again-the-story-of-the-human-rights-act-and-of-the-new-bill-of-rights/ .

Most recently the UK government introduced a "Bill of Rights". Despite its name, it changed little with respect to the applicability of the ECHR, but it does make it harder (again) for litigants to rely on the Convention in practice.

(Note that the ECHR, both the court and the convention, are completely separate institutions from the EU.)