Court

11/01/2024

A contract dispute is sort of like a synthesized Schrödinger’s cat.

The hypothetical cat (the defendant) may be considered simultaneously to be both alive and dead (guilty and not guilty), while it is unobserved in a closed box (during the pre-court and in-court processes, prior to a verdict), as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event (a settlement or the judge’s verdict) that may or may not occur.

Effectively, until there is a settlement or the judge pronounces his or her verdict, the defendant is both guilty and innocent of the plaintiff’s charges.

There’s only two means to collapse the matter into the classical and known world; settlement, or wait for the judge’s verdict.

I can’t prove this but the results are always different for settlement and the judge’s verdict. Settlement ends up in between guilty and non-guilty, but a judge’s verdict is far more binary (guilty or not-guilty, and one party pays the other).

The same defendant can be (a) not guilty if they settle and pay, or if they don’t settle and subject themselves to the judge’s verdict they can be (b) innocent or (c) guilty of the charges.

In no scenario is there any ground truth. It’s a great example of quantum uncertainty.