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The entire US Code is now online in XML

uscodebeta.house.gov

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Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#161

Post by minor_nitwit »

liscovich wrote: post #149
minor_nitwit wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you wouldn't write in English, you'd write it in Lisp.

Do you know of any examples of actual legal documents written in Lisp, or some other formal language?

haha, no. It was meant as a quasi-joke. I'd like to see one though.

Certain laws are very cut-and-dry (speeding for instance) and perhaps laws could be proven on a functional basis.

You could even make it axiomatic from the constitution and declaration of independence.

Of course, you'd need to define the axiomatic meaning of things like 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' - which is hard to do even with such simple language.

And then after loading the axioms, you'd spend a lifetime going through errors in the existing laws.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#162

Post by gsnedders »

vog wrote: post #139

I find it amusing that here in Germany, we have that for years: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ All laws are available in XML, HTML, PDF, etc. The site also provides an RSS feed. In addition, some enthusiasts regularily download stuff from there and apply those to a Git repository: https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze That way, this repository contains not only the current laws, but also the history of how the law…

Likewise in the UK:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats/

XML, HTML, RDF/XML for everything, as well as browsable online (often with original source PDFs of the printed laws), with both online and RDF/XML representations showing all alterations to the law (with date, cross-reference to the Act that made the amendment, etc.).

The website is one of the big success stories of RDF, IMO, as it is all based around a model of the laws in RDF, with everything else just being varying serializations thereof. It also allows the website to show what has been amended — no need for dumping stuff to GitHub and then diffing it! (e.g., see the annotation on 28(1)c in http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/part/IV)

That all said, there tends to be a delay between the PDF being uploaded and everything being marked up and entered into the RDF database (see the "new legislation" on the home page).

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#163

Post by jamieb »

minor_nitwit wrote: post #160
mayanksinghal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Anonymity is not binary. - What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable? - What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere? - What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected…

Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes. What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools? They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a gover…

Yes. This is my point. =) Only by actually working out all these details can we have just laws, and IMHO, we would discover that most of our laws are not just.

We want law that prevents criminals from breaking into banks and stealing your cash, but what we got was a law able to be used to persecute young people to the point of suicide for accessing an "open" system belonging to an educational establishment.

The laws we have now cannot do what they claim to do without being impossibly broad or impossible to implement. As was was discussed elsewhere today, the joke of a "Do what I mean" button, is that nobody, in fact, knows what they mean, and this goes exponentially so for a congress of 500 or so people.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#164

Post by jamieb »

rmc wrote: post #113
jamieb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. So someone could write a unit test for "Will this allow the NSA to create a secret court that is outside the rule of law?" or "Does accessing a university computer that has an open access policy allow for a sentence of 130 years?" I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

I think that's impossible with the current English language, and the fact that human beings disagree about lots of things.

That's my point.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#165

Post by minor_nitwit »

krapp wrote: post #154
minor_nitwit wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, as part of making the law - congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one. Then the law is defined by its tests. Is it okay to collect all XYZ data? Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Is it okay to collect XYZ data and hold it for X days? Is it okay to store and index but not search a collection of XYZ data? The law would end…

IANAL but I don't think it's possible to parse laws with that degree of certainty, or to determine an upper bound for "all possible interpretations," as different people can disagree as to what the "spirit" of a law is, or should be, or could be for the forseeable future. The US Constitution is pretty straightforward, and people are still waging petty wars over individual words to wrest their idea of "intent" from th…

What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal.

Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#166

Post by rtpg »

saraid216 wrote: post #93
OldSchool wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me, accustomed to logic, determinism and mathematical models for laws of nature, this was actually a surprise. Instinctively I still find it distasteful, though I can't say I have anything better to offer other than the unrealistic ideal that all judges would be guaranteed to be truly impartial. I have never directly benefited nor been harmed by the nature of this 'code' either, unless you count getting…

> the unrealistic ideal that all judges would be guaranteed to be truly impartial. Even this isn't necessarily a good thing. Part of the value of a judge is having an empathetic element in the position of final arbiter. Decisions aren't always "GUILTY / NOT GUILTY"; they're often long-form essays discussing the merits of the case, the factors under consideration, the logic and reasoning behind the ultimate conclusion…

You can be empathetic to someone without being partial to them.

But your point still stands. The reasoning and specificity of cases are what define common law precedent.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#167

Post by brown9-2 »

OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

What you've described is a trait of human beings, not politicians and lawyers.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#169

Post by jacques_chester »

mjn wrote: post #140
jamieb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. So someone could write a unit test for "Will this allow the NSA to create a secret court that is outside the rule of law?" or "Does accessing a university computer that has an open access policy allow for a sentence of 130 years?" I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

There's a sub-area of AI, since about the 1970s, that does try to do that, but it's very much at the research level. Modeling even simple "common sense" things is notoriously hard for computers (commonsense reasoning seems to require a large amount of implicit background information), so it's not clear that easy to unit-test coincides well with a human notion of simplicity and predictability. That's one reason that,…

Classical logic doesn't work in a legal context. You need at least to use fuzzy logic to model the domain.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#170

Post by jacques_chester »

OldSchool wrote: post #53

Caveat for for many of us overly rational thinkers: the powers that be deliberately are allowed to 'interpret' this code nondeterministically by many different means including its 'spirit,' admissibility of relevant information, manipulation of venue and participants, apparently even extrajudicial proceedings lately. In short, that allows a lawyer to answer almost any question with "it depends," and start billing.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this.

Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.

Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field. We can do a lot of things to simply make essential complexity go away while we bicker amongst ourselves about accidental complexity.

Law can't do that. Law must treat all cases, all combinations, as they arise. Every single day a configuration of people, motives and circumstances emerges that has never before emerged, could not have been foreseen and which may never occur again. The law must still apply.

Law is hard because the problem domain is everything humans do.

Let me know how many story points you think that scope is worth.

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