Most people think that to understand law, you need to understand a set of rules. That’s a mistake, as Stanley Fish taught us.¹ The law is best understood through stories—stories that teach what is later summarized in a catalog of rules.

So it is with stories that I begin. Each (there are four) captures a theme that recurs throughout the book. Each is meant both to orient and to disorient—that is, to show ways in which cyberspace is both like and unlike real space. At the end of this chapter, I come clean about the themes and provide a map. For now, just focus on the stories.

Borders

It was a very ordinary dispute, this argument between Martha Jones and her neighbors.² It was the sort of dispute that people have had since the start of neighborhoods. It didn’t begin, this particular dispute, in anger. It began with a misunderstanding. In this world, misunderstandings like this are far too common. Martha thought about that as she wondered whether she should stay. There were other places she could go. Leaving would mean abandoning what she had built, but frustrations like this were beginning to get to her. Maybe, she thought, it was time to move on.

The argument was about borders—about where her land stopped. It seemed like a simple idea, one you would have thought the powers-that-be would have worked out many years before. But here they were, her neighbor Dank and she, still fighting about borders. Or rather, about something fuzzy at the borders—about something of Martha’s that spilled over into the land of others. This was the fight, and it all related to what Martha did.

Martha grew flowers. Not just any flowers, but flowers with an odd sort of power. They were beautiful flowers, and their scent entranced. But however beautiful, these flowers were also poisonous. For this was Martha’s weird idea: to make flowers of extraordinary beauty which, if touched, would kill. Strange no doubt, no one said that Martha wasn’t strange. She was unusual, as was this neighborhood. But sadly, disputes like this were not.

The start of the argument was predictable enough. Martha’s neighbor, Dank, had a dog. Dank’s dog died. And of course, the dog died because it had eaten a petal from one of Martha’s flowers. A beautiful petal, and now a dead dog. Dank had his own ideas about these flowers, and about this neighbor, and he expressed those ideas—perhaps with a bit too much anger, or perhaps with anger appropriate to the situation.

“There is no reason to grow deadly flowers,” Dank yelled across the fence. “There’s no reason to get so upset about a few dead dogs,” Martha replied. “A dog can always be replaced. And anyway, why have a dog that suffers when dying? Get yourself a pain-free dog, and my petals will cause no harm.”

I came into the argument at about this time. I was walking by, in the way one walks in this space. (Some would say I was teleporting, but we needn’t complicate the story with jargon. Let’s just say I was walking.) I saw the two neighbors getting increasingly angry with each other. I had heard about the disputed flowers—about how some petals carried their poison. It seemed to me a simple problem to solve, but I guess it’s simple only if you understand how problems like this get made.

Dank and Martha were angry because in a sense they were stuck. Both had built a life in the neighborhood, invested many hours there, and come to understand its limits. This is a common condition: we all build our lives in places with limits.⁰ We all are disappointed at times. What was different about Dank and Martha?

Footnotes

¹ See, for example, Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), ch. 17. Edit Delete

² It is also hypothetical. I have constructed this story in light of what could be, and in places is. But I’m a law professor; I make up hypotheticals for a living. Edit Delete