Tell me about Professor Widen . . .

Professor Widen Teaches at University of Miami School of Law

William H. Widen has been a professor  of law at the University of Miami School of Law since 2001.

Selected quotes:

" Business law is about as complicated as Donkey Kong."

" Each year half of the students at law schools around the country are ranked in the bottom half of their classes.  Why should UM be any different?"

"Clients and firms don't pay you for incompetence."

'Incompetence': NOUN- inability to do something successfully; ineptitude.
synonyms: ineptness · inability · lack of ability · incapability · incapacity · lack of skill ·
lack of proficiency · amateurishness · inexpertness · clumsiness · ineffectiveness · inadequacy ·
deficiency · inefficiency · ineffectuality · ineffectualness · insufficiency ·· uselessness ·
hopelessness

antonyms: competence · prowess (particularly, for our purposes, with the UCC)

Curriculum Vitae for William H. Widen:

Professor Widen practiced commercial and corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore from 1984 to 2001, where he was a partner from 1991.

Professor Widen was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School from 1993-2002.

During 1983-84, Professor Widen clerked for the Honorable Levin H. Campbell, Chief Judge, First Circuit Court of Appeals, Boston, Massachusetts.

From 1980-1983, Professor Widen attended Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude in 1983 with a juris doctor degree.

From 1976-1980, Professor Widen attended Stanford University, where he was elected Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with honors and distinction in 1980 with an AB in philosophy.

Musings on Law and Games: 

So, just how complicated is donkey kong?  Or pac-man.  Or any other modern incarnation of the video game?  And how did you learn  to play these games, if in fact you did?  Chances are, you did not learn to play the game by reading an instruction booklet.  Maybe you learned, quarter by quarter, in some bar or video arcade.  Maybe your best friend's parents bought Atari, Nintendo or Playstation and you played for free until sent home.  Bit by bit you learned the rules of the game the hard way--your electronic being was repeatedly eaten, smashed or otherwise munged (generally in sets of three).

In bits and pieces you learned the rules.  "Generally the bad guys eat me if they catch me; provided, however, if I eat a magic pill, for approximately 5 seconds thereafter, I turn blue and can eat them.  At the end of five seconds, I am no longer blue and the bad guys can eat me again."  Such is a sample verbalization of the type of rules you learned by playing the game.  So formalized, the video game starts to look a lot like law.  Indeed, the behavior of the electronic beings on screen is programmed in the code that establishes the parameters of the game.