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.”

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.

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

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.

lsup 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.”

“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.

Alsup was born in 1945 in Jackson, Mississippi, the son of two rural Texans — a nurse and a civil engineer who got his start under Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Even as a boy, Alsup displayed the freewheeling curiosity and technical bent that would characterize his later life. He spent much of his childhood alongside Hubert Feild, now a professor at Auburn University. Friends since the age of six, the two built forts together, buried time capsules, launched lighter-than-air balloons made of laundry bags, shot flaming matches from clothespins (an Alsup invention), and had “dirt clod wars,” which, Feild said, were “not recommended.”

“Bill was an extremely bright kid,” Feild said. Alsup taught himself piano, but, dissatisfied with the sound, modified the instrument by pressing thumb tacks into the hammers that strike the piano wire. His hack made the piano sound like it came from a long-lost cowboy saloon. “I still have recordings of Bill playing classic songs (such as those by Ray Charles) on his ‘new and improved’ version of his piano,” Feild said.

But if there was one gadget that caught the boys’ imaginations, it was ham radios. The two spent hours listening to shortwave broadcasts, combing frequencies on a Zenith Transoceanic radio with a seven-foot telescoping antenna. They tuned into faraway stations like Radio Moscow, Radio Quito, and Radio Havana, but most of their time was spent listening to the amateur radio operators — the so-called “hams.”

“As we listened to the conversations from hams in various states in the US as well as foreign countries, it was as if a ‘new world’ had been discovered beyond the confines of Mississippi,” Feild said. He would listen as Alsup, who became a licensed ham operator while still in high school, carried on conversations from his bedroom with far-off interlocutors, sometimes in Morse Code.