CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification

Post by nicwilson » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

phillipcarter wrote: post #74

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).

Post by juunpp » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:42 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #36

Naming is hard Catala is cardsharper (cheat) in russian.

Post by OJFord » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #174

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? How many improperly punished people is good enough? How many cases go to Supreme Court because the amount of needless ambiguity just adds up, one word at a time? > This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means. Right? Why do many l…

I don't know how many is good enough. If it's every other person, than that's bad; if it's two people since the law was written 50 years ago, I would say that's good enough in my book. Which is it? And no, cases don't often make it to the Supreme Court because the wording of the law is ambiguous. They make it to the SC because the parties disagree on legal principles and on whether laws are unconstituional or not. >…

Post by lolinder » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 12:20 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #165

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.

> As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined. Which is why it is the common standard in German law to define every possibly unclear term either in the relevant section of the law itself or in an introduction article.

Post by jrm4 » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 12:27 AM UTC

ambyra wrote: post #89

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?"

Yeah, there’s no way that a modern computer could outdo the logical accuracy and processing power of our 300 year old legal system. Court rooms and arguing and paperwork, much more efficient than silicon.