How 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.
How's that account for language drift over centuries?
Catala – Law to Code
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#32Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development. There are judges and politicians in the US t…
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Re: Catala – Law to Code
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The same can be said about driving but self-driving cars exist.
So is the "bitter lesson" that fuzzy overlords will be practically preferable to hand coded legislation?
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#34> 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"?
It does stand to reason that all law could be formalized. For example, consider the definition of murder in the first degree from 18 USC § 1111:
"Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought."
You might say, well, "unlawful" and "malice" are fuzzy concepts; but we can take them to be facts that we input into the model. I guess we could write something like this in Catala:
scope Murder :
definition in_the_1st_degree
under condition is_malice_aforethought and is_unlawful consequence
equals
true
However, in other areas of law, determining the facts is actually where the real work is -- was there malice aforethought? A formalized legal machine could process these facts but it's not a big help. The models would just be a huge list of assumptions that have to be input and a minimal calculation that produces `true` or one of the alternatives of an enum.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#35I suspect this works better outside of common law legislation.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understanding intent is understanding interest and that's not philosophy. If it's not about interest, it's psychiatry - not philosophy either. Besides, only a lesser part of law is about intent, the major part is about punishing and avoiding harm, finding the true facts and applying the written law to them. Down-voting can't change the truth, we've been led by the nose for far too long.
To avoid harm, you must identify intent. To punish, you must establish intent. Intent has been the core underiding feature of the law since the Magna Carta. To ignore or trivialise it is nothing short of advocating for the return of kings.
> Intent has been the core underiding feature of the law since the Magna Carta.
I've already explained that intent is another word for interest - material or political, it may not be as trivial as potato chips but it's far simpler than rocket science.
> To ignore or trivialise it is nothing short of advocating for the return of kings.
Another purely speculative assertion with zero meaning or practical value.
There's no logical path from trivializing your occultist and unknowable notion if intent to the return of kings. First, you've got to start with a proof that at present there aren't any kings... but philosophy's got no proofs.
Speaking of kinks (sic), wasn't Epstein one of them? Or at least under their protection... until he wasn't, as usual.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#37Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development. There are judges and politicians in the US t…
> "interpretations"... which are different from what the law literally says.
We have to remember that the letter and spirit of the law can grow apart over time, and loopholes are often gamed before that naturally happens anyway. So obviously we still need judges to keep the "spiritual" aspect of intent alive, so that evil isn't laundered through technicality.
"Literal" should really be a concrete thing, but it does feel strangely connected to a problem that has existed since Sola Scriptura, up to Gödel's theorem. I think about this everytime software and law collide. That article on "what color are your bits"[1] also comes to mind.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#38 scope QualifiedEmployeeDiscount :
definition qualified_employee_discount
under condition is_property consequence
equals
if employee_discount >=
customer_price \* gross_profit_percentage
then customer_price \* gross_profit_percentage
else employee_discount
Not sure I'm seeing any law-specific features either. Maybe if there were some tokens like 'jurisdiction' or 'jurisprudence', but it seems like yet another programming language.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#39Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development. There are judges and politicians in the US t…
> "interpretations"... which are different from what the law literally says. We have to remember that the letter and spirit of the law can grow apart over time, and loopholes are often gamed before that naturally happens anyway. So obviously we still need judges to keep the "spiritual" aspect of intent alive, so that evil isn't laundered through technicality. "Literal" should really be a concrete thing, but it does f…
Curiously enough, law in the US, which inherits from Common Law, is heavily focused on the interpretation (the case law) in the courts of the written law, as opposed to the written words themselves. This is in contract with civil law, napoleonic law and Japanese law, which places greater importance on the written words themselves.
Re: Catala – Law to Code
#40Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development. There are judges and politicians in the US t…
Catala is specifically for tax codes and other laws that involve formulas and calculations, not all laws, so I don’t think most of your concerns apply to it specifically. There are often complicated rules governing how, e.g. benefits or tax credits are calculated that natural language is clumsy at expressing, so having a formal language that encodes that logic seems useful.
I agree government/justice by algorithm would be very dangerous, but Catala does not seem to be that.