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I was rather thinking about fuzzying it to find gaps in tax laws.
Someone did do this - finding discontinuities in the tax law - using formal methods, for the French tax law: https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.h...
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I was rather thinking about fuzzying it to find gaps in tax laws.
In a previous job we built an advisor for banking and pensions using a mathematical optimiser solving over a model of the Danish tax rules. It would normally find enough tax savings to retire about a year earlier by finding the best savings strategies (e.g exploiting dynamic and temporal effects between taxation on spouses retiring at different times, using the house mortgage as a savings buffer to shift pension payo…
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It would be more valuable to write many fewer, simpler policies, but transparently document the why when it comes to decisions by stakeholders. For example, the only difference between getting something from the government (say, a California Public Records request) and a court is (1) cost and (2) the court almost always has to write a defensible opinion for why something happened some way, but a government agency doe…
> the court almost always has to write a defensible opinion for why something happened some way, but a government agency does not. That's not true. Agencies that do rulemaking have to provide justification for why they're enacting or repealing particular regulations, otherwise those regulations can be struck down as capricious. This is a major problem the Trump administration had: a lot of their attempts to rollback…
...in the court of law. Someone had to go and sue the administration. When they issued the policies, they simply provided no meaningful justification. You're proving my point.
Gotta love the sense of humour.
I've been asked to write parser of _my_country_law_ and something that's capable of doing diffs and putting it together (diff+original=>newest version) docs without knowledge in that domain after seeing sample doc I've estimated it on something like 1 week of work (XD) month later I've been crying and having like 20-30% done this shit has been so sensitive (insanely error prone) and debugging was time costly. I think…
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I feel like legislation is a field that would benefit a great deal from the progress that software engineering has made in a number of fields. It's already evolved somewhat into a DSL. With some nudging and technical leadership, I suspect that we could move it over entirely into a format that can be readily parsed, tested, and version control. The tax code is especially well-suited to this, because it's a lot of rule…
Laws are supposed to be systematic invariants, and to specify them requires a comprehensive vocabulary containing the union of all the things people do in a life. This language is necessarily bound to your time and place, and it may not translate well in the future. (I feel like laws that live long enough to outlast the language in which they were defined hasn't actually been solved! Certainly we should have to rewor…
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> the court almost always has to write a defensible opinion for why something happened some way, but a government agency does not. That's not true. Agencies that do rulemaking have to provide justification for why they're enacting or repealing particular regulations, otherwise those regulations can be struck down as capricious. This is a major problem the Trump administration had: a lot of their attempts to rollback…
> a lot of their attempts to rollback Obama's policies or enact new ones foundered on the ability to provide this justification ...in the court of law. Someone had to go and sue the administration. When they issued the policies, they simply provided no meaningful justification. You're proving my point.
I've been asked to write parser of _my_country_law_ and something that's capable of doing diffs and putting it together (diff+original=>newest version) docs without knowledge in that domain after seeing sample doc I've estimated it on something like 1 week of work (XD) month later I've been crying and having like 20-30% done this shit has been so sensitive (insanely error prone) and debugging was time costly. I think…
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Yes, in the current system it's shifting goalposts. That is a bad system. You cannot completely successfully codify something that is based on the vagaries of wishy-washy language, nor specific legal concepts like the intent of regulations or the context of prior judgements. Therefore, improve the language: don't give up! Imagine if latitude and longitude weren't invented because "sorta over there a few days sail bey…
The last century has seen a huge increase in the quantity of law that is written out explicitly in statutes [1], rather than being worked out on a case-by-case basis according to the common law method. This is an attempt to “improve the language” as you have suggested, but it has not made the law easier to comprehend. Detailed statutes make it harder for lawyers to build up a coherent picture of the entire legal syst…