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posted by martyb on Friday October 14 2016, @09:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the move-it-to-github-and-run-blame dept.

Gottfried Leibniz — who died 300 years ago this November — worked on many things. But a theme that recurred throughout his life was the goal of turning human law into an exercise in computation. Of course, as we know, he didn't succeed. But three centuries later, I think we're finally ready to give it a serious try again. And I think it's a really important thing to do — not only because it'll enable all sorts of new societal opportunities and structures, but also because I think it's likely to be critical to the future of our civilization in its interaction with artificial intelligence.

Human law, almost by definition, dates from the very beginning of civilization — and undoubtedly it's the first system of rules that humans ever systematically defined. Presumably it was a model for the axiomatic structure of mathematics as defined by the likes of Euclid. And when science came along, "natural laws" (as their name suggests) were at first viewed as conceptually similar to human laws, except that they were supposed to define constraints for the universe (or God), rather than for humans.

What's your favorite law, written as code?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Friday October 14 2016, @10:37AM

    by ledow (5567) on Friday October 14 2016, @10:37AM (#414217) Homepage

    If you're going to have legal restrictions, exceptions and get-outs, and differing punishments according to formulae, those should be "open" and readable.

    The biggest problem with law is that the specifics are held behind a multitude of differing corner-cases held only in established case law (not statutes), only practically accessible via stupendously expensive third-party services that aren't open to the public.

    Codifying the law is pretty much already done. This is the offence, the definition of it is this, and the definition of each part of that is defined elsewhere but you CAN find it if you look hard enough.

    What's missing is the accessibility of this. When I research, say, assault - with the definition - I should be able to "link" to all the internal definitions (e.g. person, harm, etc.) and, if I need to, find out case law where the limits of each were established or changed.

    In general, the average member of the public JUST CANNOT DO THIS. It's all in thousands of books, or far-too-expensive online services that only lawyers can practically afford.

    As others have pointed out, revision control is also more important. As well as modularity (this bunch of human rights laws can't suddenly slip in a copyright exemption clause). But you also need openness, readability, and explicit notification of changes and affecting statements and having that pretty much removes any need to actually codify things at all.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @12:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @12:22PM (#414245)

    IBM's Watson - they should throw their star learning machine into the legal ring. I wonder how it would fare.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday October 14 2016, @03:48PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday October 14 2016, @03:48PM (#414340) Journal

    If you're going to have legal restrictions, exceptions and get-outs, and differing punishments according to formulae, those should be "open" and readable.

    Agreed, though the more the law tries to codify all the corner cases, often the worse it gets... because real life is not like a computer program. In computer code, there are generally a LOT of constraints on the system governing possible inputs and outcomes. Sure, you may put a plain old dialogue box somewhere that a user could type anything into, but there's still restrictions on what could possibly come in there. A car can't crash through your dialogue box and find its way into the code needing to be processed by your "elseif" expression, for example. But in real life, all sorts of stuff could randomly fly in the window and introduce completely unanticipated variables into a situation.

    Take the various disasters that "mandatory sentencing" laws have created, for example. There are almost always unintended consequences, and in some cases those consequences go beyond "unjust" in some cases and enter into the realm of complete irrationality -- and all because a legislature decided it wanted to try to create more consistency in the "law."

    Basically, my view on all this is that there's a difference between "the law" and "justice." The "law" should be codified and detailed to create standards, sure. But "justice" inevitably entails making adjustments to a particular real-world situation and thus cannot be codified completely.

    The biggest problem with law is that the specifics are held behind a multitude of differing corner-cases held only in established case law (not statutes)

    That's the reality of a "common law" legal system. The whole point of "common law" is the recognition that justice has to be handled through individual judicial cases, rather than created in a single civil code intended to be applicable for all times and places.

    But you also need openness, readability, and explicit notification of changes and affecting statements and having that pretty much removes any need to actually codify things at all.

    Yeah, the problem with all of this is that common law "precedent" requires interpretation. It's usually not as straightforward as the courtroom drama where some lawyer comes walking in at the last minute with a dusty book and says, "Well, according to Samuelson v. Virginia in 1935, you can't do X, so I move for immediate dismissal!" Sure, things like Supreme Court cases are generally regarded as "binding precedent" for all U.S. courts, which means that decisions there govern lower court actions. But the status of other legal opinions at various levels often require a bit more interpretation as to whether it actually applies.

    And actually, the biggest issue is that COMMON precedent that is well-known is NOT generally hidden in obscure books or databases that only lawyers can find. Popular precedents that are frequently cited tend to work their way into lawbooks and indexes everywhere. The more obscure precedents that get cited in court usually come with a huge caveat because they aren't exactly on point -- the circumstances may be slightly different, the ruling may have been limited in various ways, etc. And judges are often skeptical when somebody walks in with a bizarre and obscure old case that claims to contradict all other common interpretations of a law.

    So, what lawyers and then judges do is a complex operation of "pattern matching" -- is the other case ENOUGH like the current one to be applicable? Exactly what determinations of the judgment are applicable to this new case, and which were only meant to govern the older specific circumstances? Are there aspects of the wording that are subtly different from the statute you're dealing with now? Etc., etc.

    In most cases, both sides will present a set of precedents that they think make their case, and it's up to the judge to figure out which set of these things makes the most sense applied to the new case. (In prominent Supreme Court cases, you frequently will have not only the entire legal history of the case, but amicus briefs from dozens of other groups, each often citing their own slate of precedents -- so there may literally be hundreds of competing precedents that need to be taken into account.)

    It's not like there's ever going to be a simple "checklist" we can go down and say, "Okay, this is crime A, so statute B applies, and it's circumstances C, so we plug in precedent D..." etc. But there ARE established indexes of common precedents. And in those cases, I agree that they should be as accessible as possible to the public. On the other hand, if you don't have a fancy lawyer to interpret them, you're very likely to walk in and say, "But your honor, in my index I found Samuelson v. Virginia which says..." and then judge will just stare at you and say, "Yes, but obviously Samuelson is not relevant to this case for reasons X, Y, and Z."

    Thus, I'm not sure you ever get past the "expert" barrier necessary to deal seriously in law. I agree that the general public should have access to all resources, but decisions are always going to hinge on the legal details, many of which will require expertise to interpret.