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In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."
I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?
In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
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In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
Thanks for the interesting read. But, I have to say, I didn't understand it at all.
I think it is very deliberately written to be impossible to "understand". If you think you have found its clear and unambiguous meaning, you're wrong.
Man, I hated last year’s clanker-tone, and I hate this one’s too by now. I don’t want to read the word load-bearing ever again. The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.
> Parliament cannot restate the entire legal corpus each session. IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that. Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.
Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting... Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially…
Interesting indeed! What have you learned from the patent space and what kinds of questions can you answer after perhaps solving that domain?
A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.
Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.
The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.
I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...
> Parliament cannot restate the entire legal corpus each session. IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that. Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.
How would it work though? Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.
* Laws of the Land
* Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Final 2
* Copy of Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29 with 11 o' clock amendments
>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time. I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past…
European Convention on Human Rights, Article 7: "No punishment without law"
1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act
or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or
international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier
penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal
offence was committed.
I guess this is not meant as a general introduction, but it would have been useful to acknowledge the differences between different legal systems somewhere at the start? (Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)