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Lawyer here. Oh, this again. I suppose this looks relatively harmless, but I'm always wary of "law is like computer code." The impulse to think this can strongly solve any real problem in the law is intuitively attractive, but I strongly predict this mostly never happens; it's the law's job to be intensely practical in the face of hard-edged "computer-like" rules. If anything, you get goofy confusion about what thing…
Will it help? On the one hand, I think it would be fantastic, if you had automated tests for the law. For example, when German politicians introduced the "hacker law", you could have pointed out that "This new law would break the 'security researchers need to be allowed to do penetration testing' test". On the other hand, "Brexit is in conflict with the Good Friday Agreement, we need a solution for Nothern Ireland."…
What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value" as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't help with that. The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for interpretation bey…
Examples of how this could be useful:
- Reducing the overhead for maintaining a list of semantic translations of that legal code into other languages. Of course the official language is the only one that is "legal" but the other translations should be close enough to effectively express the nuance provided the language outputs are maintained by people who can actually speak those languages.
- Producing machine executable proof or simulation code. This could be used for "fuzzing" the legal code to identify loopholes or unintended outcomes so that legislators can then propose improved terms to avoid those issues. This is by no means "making code law" but it provides an additional tool for understanding the law and how the many different parts of the legal code interact with each other.
- Adding on to the previous example, sim code could be integrated into complex models for simulating the impact of legal changes on the economy at large or specific segments.
- Finance related code can be used to generate a tool or API for validating tax, accounting, and compliance documents (as a first pass to catch errors early and reduce overhead) as well as to even prepare some of those documents. These tools often already exist but they are one or more steps removed from the actual legal definition which increases the risk of error as well as the overhead of maintaining them (which can potentially encourage rent seeking behavior by commercial providers of these tools).
France actually is already doing this to a reasonable degree albeit the "codified" version is based on the law rather than the codified version producing plaintext law. The DGFiP [1] maintains a gitlab organisation [2] that includes both Catala and MLang [3] representations of different parts of the french legal code for exactly these purposes.
1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_d...
Completely unrelated to Catalan (Català), the language spoken in Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't help them much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software-interface contracts generally aren’t (cf. Design by Contract). The parent is correct insofar as the use of the word “contract” is not limited to contracts as defined by law.
Right, I mean, I've heard this use and I think it's kind of silly. It's like calling a hopefully-completed-circuit in some device an "electric contract" or something like that.
The Catalan language name is written Català.
It is named after a French guy called Pierre Catala, not the language. Probably the name comes from the language but according to the documentation does not seem to be with acute accent. > The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data. The research group that he led in the late 1960s, the Centre d’études et de…
'à' has a grave accent, not an acute accent.
What problem does this solve? It appears to add precision where it's mostly already clear - perhaps it can enforce some kind of rigor... but then like the example given uses "fair market value" as a term which I'd expect to be the kind of thing that's in contention, rather than any of the actual "logic", and it doesn't help with that. The reason we have courts and lawyers is because of the need for interpretation bey…
Completely unrelated to Catalan (Català), the language spoken in Catalonia (Catalunya). I think if someone wants to google a question about this, "catala language beginner hello world" won't help them much.