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CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

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Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#71

Post by bjt »

kstrauser wrote: post #51
jrm4 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the actual court system?"

The courts have to evaluate what they think the law's drafters meant: Yeah, it says this, but it's obvious the legislators didn't mean for it to be read that way. It'd be nice if there were footnotes that expounded on what the authors were trying to accomplish to help courts interpret the laws.

At least in the US, it's not the drafters' intent that matters, but the intent of the legislators who voted on it. (Legislators actually have lawmaking power. Drafters are usually unelected staff or even lobbyists.)

When a statute is ambiguous, courts do sometimes look at the congressional record (eg floor debates) to determine intent.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#73

Post by bjt »

Kretinsky wrote: post #23
tgv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that. It's hard to write legal texts, and sometimes it's better to be vague, so the courts have some freedom when establishing jurisprudence. Treaties can be written with vague wording to allow parties to sign it, even if there isn't 100% agreement. That's an old practice.

On the contrary, it's much better to have very clear text, otherwise it will turn against the citizen. Imagine that you have an income tax where "income" isn't clearly defined. Someone will end up with an audit and a lawsuit from the tax office because their definition will be, of course, extensive (every income, including non-realized capital gains) whereas most citizens would only consider salaries. In the end, you…

It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve. Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little scenario.

So there are different tiers to deal with this.

- Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed.

- Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific.

- Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended for broad application.

- Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#74

Post by phillipcarter »

kstrauser wrote: post #30

I think what I'd rather see is a standardize test suite format for laws that spells out the intentions. Once I lived in a state that proposed a very simple anti-child porn law with good intent, but it was too simple. It read sort of like "anyone sending explicit pictures of minors from a cell phone will be guilty of conveying child porn". It was written in the proper legal jargon, but wasn't a whole lot more detailed…

I think for something like this to be effective, you need the actual intent encoded correctly (so this use case wouldn’t have been solved), and lawmakers acting in good faith (i.e., not drafting legislation that’s intentionally vague such that it can cast a wide net and force people to use the courts to dispute things).

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#76

Post by mdaniel »

Rochus wrote: post #47
jrm4 wrote: post #9

Lawyer here. Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." The impulse to think this can strongly solve any real problem in the law is intuitively attractive, but I strongly predict this mostly never happens; it's the law's job to be intensely practical in the face of hard-edged "computer-like" rules. If anything, you get goofy confusion about what thing…

> Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (Twain?) Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic matters of daily life? There already was a discussion two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059899

> Hasn't Cyc impressively demonstrated just how incredibly difficult and costly it is to formalize even the most basic matters of daily life?

I would offer that the "cost/benefit" analysis for such a formalism exists on at least two axes: the concept domain which one is attempting to formalize, and the benefit (and/or size of consumers) of any such working system

I can wholly understand that trying to translate the entirety of English into a formal logic system sounds overwhelming. But to side with a sibling commenter, why not at least start with the tax code which is a personal pain point, has (presumably) a correct outcome for some cases, and is mostly algorithms-in-English

And then, for the consumer side: ok, if I snapped my fingers and Cyc existed and worked I struggle to think how exactly my life would change. If the formally-specified tax code existed and worked I wouldn't have to rage-upvote almost every comment on the annual tax hatred thread

I would even offer that an incomplete version could still be useful if one left "fuzzy" variables in the corpus, and said "welp, we can't define what a $Person is because of the hundreds of years of precedent, so you'll need an actual Judge for that". I don't meant to say that 50% of the corpus can be undefined variables, that's just silly, but I'd hope the tax code isn't built upon 50% undefined behavior, even if accountants want you to think it is

Re: CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

#80

Post by melenaboija »

pxc wrote: post #66
melenaboija wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is named after a French guy called Pierre Catala, not the language. Probably the name comes from the language but according to the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. > The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data. The research group that he led in the late 1960s, the Centre d’études et de…

> the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. 'à' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.

Yups right, sorry :(
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