Catala – Law to Code
catala-lang.org
Catala – Law to Code
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#2How does this incorporate case law?
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#3[flagged]
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#4[flagged]
Not even unrelated, Catala (the law-language) seems to be a French project, supported by institutions in France, and Catalan seems to have a intertwined history with France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language#France
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#5Huh I just finished a book by Jaron Lanier that described a hypothetical system literally just like this. Always fun to get a coincidence like this
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#6How does this incorporate case law?
That's not so important in Napoleonic/Civil jurisdictions like France. Judges can consider prior rulings, but the law as-written is the main thing.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#7> The aim is not to formalise or put into code all the law, because that would make no sense, but we are interested in the law that is already executed automatically, such as the calculation of social benefits, tax or unemployment.
Can anyone explain why it's believed this "would make no sense"?
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#8> The aim is not to formalise or put into code all the law, because that would make no sense, but we are interested in the law that is already executed automatically, such as the calculation of social benefits, tax or unemployment. Can anyone explain why it's believed this "would make no sense"?
I assume it would fail to compile, or error out, because of myriad conflicts throughout the body of laws.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#9> The aim is not to formalise or put into code all the law, because that would make no sense, but we are interested in the law that is already executed automatically, such as the calculation of social benefits, tax or unemployment. Can anyone explain why it's believed this "would make no sense"?
Law isn't written to cover 100% of real life scenarios and potential cases, it's written with deliberate parts of ambiguity, that will ultimately be up to courts to set the precedents for, in various situations and context.
I think the idea is that you can't really cover 100% of real-life cases in "code", either legal or software, so the areas you'll leave this out of would be those "not-entirely-strict" parts.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#10> The aim is not to formalise or put into code all the law, because that would make no sense, but we are interested in the law that is already executed automatically, such as the calculation of social benefits, tax or unemployment. Can anyone explain why it's believed this "would make no sense"?
I think the primary reason is that laws are about human convention, not real objects which one can clearly and deliberately define. Like at the most basic level nothing exists at all except for quantum fields or something like that. Everything else we talk about on a regular basis, people, dogs, streets, businesses, etc, is defined by convention to a greater or lesser degree.
It is therefore quite hard to create a formal system to refer to objects in the world in a way which induces no contradictions with intuition. This is why we have courts, among other functions of government.