I'm not sure if automated decisions are a good idea. But it would be really cool to improve productivity of politicians.
How can we expect our politicians, let alone our lay people, to understand all of the law's in a country? There is just too much text to grok.
Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?
Politicians already do use references and bucketization, i.e. write a law for schedule one drugs, then add or remove entities from the schedule one bucket. Can't we abstract even more?
Recently I've been wondering if it is feasible to create a syntax for lawyers. Like a law language with a compiler, package manager and similar tooling to compile laws rather than write them from scratch.
> Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?
Actually, the Common Law[1] (which the US, England, Canada, and other English-speaking countries) very much have a legal system that includes building abstractions, refactoring, and simplifying (though there are no tests). Judicial decisions are precedential and over time rules and tests are discarded or re-written to be easier to use and more applicable.
I think the parent comment is discussing legislation (which politicians enact), but the process by which judge made law develops and improves is very similar to how code evolves and improves.
I think what you're describing is fundamentally against the incentives of lawmakers. Complex laws make it possible to decouple legislative goals from public-image goals: when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be explained come up in a televised debate?
I agree, lawmakers benefit because lay people cannot understand the laws being passed.
That said, this is the secret. We market this to the law writers!
Getting to a point where we have 10x productivity gain will be hard but after that any tool with a 10x productivity win will be adopted. That is a no brainier.
Now we are in a future where all laws are written in this new syntax, but shared as long compiled documents full of redundant legalese English.
In such a future, lawyers can write law and contracts easily but cannot read them efficiently. Imagine writing JavaScript but debugging the assembly...
Lawyers would naturally start asking their peers to share the "source" rather than the compiled "binary", for evaluation. It is just a no brainier.
Now you have a future with a flurishing new syntax dominating the entire ecosystem. Hopefully better languages are created, etc. You even have an entire generation of lawyers who only know these higher level languages.
This isn't an overnight solution but by the time lawmakers realize the trend of higher level syntax is going to hurt their ability to hide truth, the game will already have been changed.
Just in case it isn't; we'd all benefit from laws that ordinary people can read, understand and follow.
When the quantity of law grows so great and complicated that nobody can feasibly read it becomes hard to be a law abiding citizen. Lawyers, despite rumors otherwise, are ordinary people too and benefit from clearly written law, in English for English speaking countries.
It wasn't satire, but I enjoy that you thought it was :)
I agree that society benefits when we have succinct, easily understandable laws for lay people.
That said we are currently moving father away from that target, rather than nearer.
I would argue software is doing the opposite. It started extremely obscure and has slowly but surely moved in a direction where a majority of people can learn to understand it in months.
Example, a 3 month "bootcamp" can now teach a lay person to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript and accurately predict the output of the interconnections of millions (billions?) of lines on code.
You might argue the bootcampers don't truly understand what the kernel is doing. This is the point though, thanks to abstraction, they can grok it without needing to dive deep.
I don't think there will ever exist a world where lay people will understand legalese. However, I do believe we can build a world where people can be trivially self taught and then grok new laws, and even write new laws of their own.
HTML, CSS and Javascript are not comparably complex.
In software engineering we can set scope and conceptual boundaries.
Law cannot. It is complex because the world is complex. Unless you have a mechanism for simplifying human nature, the law will continue to require specialists.
unfortunately while cynical i do believe this comment
captures the reality of the situation. whatshisface, what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-thinking predecessors had lived through?
Just like the cynical reality that C/C++ programers don't want to encourage package managers. The higher the barriers to entry the more you're talents are worth.
The reality is, regardless of any one groups desire, the productivity wins of package managers are too great and the momentum of the larger software development community is moving towards package managers for every language and will one day include C/C++.
Similarly, lawmakers are a select few of a larger community of domestic but more importantly international lawyers. You give the larger community a 10x productivity win, and just sit back and watch the domino effect work.
Lawyers already study the laws of other countries. It is common for precedents established in one country to be imported into another country by "persuasion". It is also common to more or less copy and paste legislation or other legal wording.
Draftsmanship is not the hard part of law. The hard part is everything else.
_Evidence_:
> when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be explained come up in a televised debate?
_Question_:
> what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically-thinking predecessors had lived through?
_Logic_:
An individual can only critically think about or evaluate things that are presented to them.
_Issue_:
If something is glossed over, for whatever reason (be it too difficult to understand), it has not been [and likely will never be] presented for evaluation unless ____(Reason #1).
The issue doesn't end with the lack of presentation -- instead it ends with the consensus that it's OK or necessary to gloss over things because ______(Reason #2).
I was asking a completely friendly question out of genuine curiosity as to his opinion. your insinuation that I am not capable of logical thinking based on my honest question, as well as the cutesy symbolics is a little bit rude, and I hope you got a kick out of getting all the formatting to line up. A+ work
Please remain civil, even if you feel someone has insinuated something. Which, incidentally, they often haven't. This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to read, which is an additional reason to remain civil.
Edit: unfortunately you've broken the HN guidelines with incivility quite a bit in the past too. We ban accounts that do that. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and clean up your act if you want to keep commenting here.
> I was asking a completely friendly question out of genuine curiosity as to his opinion.
Why do you feel the need to tell me this? I wouldn't have commented if I thought otherwise. P.S. There was no intention to be demeaning. Just intention to present the issue clearly.
As for the cutesy symbols, they're there to make clear that this isn't a problem because it's DIFFICULT to solve, as the solution is perfectly clear. Give individuals a voice by informing them and allow them to offer an evaluation.
The reason it's still a problem is because of a lack of leverage on the uninformed individuals' behalf.
I have had very similar thoughts over the years. To remove (or at least minimize) human bias, the law ought to follow the same strict if-then-else logic of code. All facts and evidence should be entered as variables in a system that can keep them all in it's metaphorical head at once. If there's a conflict, the code should fail to compile. There should be a revision history.
Due to the messy uncertainty of life, and our seldom perfect information, there would still be a need for humans to make the final decisions, but an automated recommendation with a confidence indicator would really be something.
> the law ought to follow the same strict if-then-else logic of code
The law does do this.
There was a period during which this was so rigidly applied that the law forked into Common Law and Equity. The latter reintroduced fuzziness partly because of the increasingly absurd injustices of the Common Law at the time.
The law is filled with linguistic variables: "similar person similarly circumstance", "person having ordinary skill in the art", "buyer at arm's length without prior notice" and so on and so forth. These terms are all defined and understood, but they are not crisp, discrete concepts that can be safely reduced to a real number.
The law is a workable and incredibly reliable system, given the scale, scope, timeframes and consequences involved. Introducing something that flatters our own profession would not add net value.
The law-lang that I imagine would be a failure if it couldn't replicate the current vagaries of today's laws.
The only thing I want to introduce is consistency through abstraction.
eg. If you want to write a law pertaining to minors, you need to define what a minor is. I'd like for the lawyers to just `import legal_entity::{minor};` and the definitions would self populate. Additionally, if you're writing a law about minors, you might need to contrast to non-minors, so you could just `import legal_entity::{minor, ...};`.
I'm sure even today definitions are relatively trivial to share, but sadly I'm not a lawyer and can't quite think of better examples of abstractions.
Maybe: eg.
current_entity.equals_with_specificity(person, Specificity.LevelThree)
&& current_situation.equals_with_specificity(situation, Specificity.LevelTwo /* Similar Circumstance */)
If it makes you feel better, I had the same basic idea and only later abandoned it[0]. My optimism was tempered by going into professional practice as a software engineer.
> The only thing I want to introduce is consistency through abstraction.
By implication you're saying this doesn't already exist. Judges and legislatures undertake a constant, dynamic process of organising and reoranising the law into workable abstractions, seeking a level that renders a problem domain tractable. Typically these are called "rules", "tests" or "doctrines", depending on their scope and purpose.
> I'd like for the lawyers to just `import legal_entity::{minor};` and the definitions would self populate.
This happens when they say "minor" in regular legalese; a lot of boilerplate is generated from templates as-is. A lot of what solicitors call "bread & butter law" is repetitious, well-worn transactional law: wills, trusts, partnerships, real estate conveyancing and so on.
I do get some sense that you are mixing together statute and caselaw. These are both The Law, but the are created in different ways and have quite different forms. Statute is amenable to formalisation and indeed many legislatures have adopted "Plain English Law" drafting rules. Many legislatures also have reform acts intended to replace, consolidate, restate or remove various historical Acts resting on the books (you can find some amazing stuff in the attic).
But caselaw is very different. It is composed of judges giving reasons for their orders. It is a continuing conversation. There are no drafting rules and in general, there can't be, because the entire purpose of the system is that two parties can submit any legal question under dispute -- any question -- and be guaranteed to receive an answer.
Just as code often has "bugs" in the face of unexpected situations, so too can the law. But the law can be patched on the fly by judges (and later replaced by statute). It requires humans speaking in natural languages, which admit indefinite nuance in a way that artificial languages don't and shouldn't.
I think given how hard it is for people to write even relatively simple bug-free smart contracts, I don’t think this is likely to happen any time soon.
Aside from that, one of the saving graces in the American system is all of the friction points between various jurisdictions that prevents government from being ruthlessly efficient. I’m not sure that it would at all be a good thing if we could actually correctly codify and automatically enact the will of the people.
I know Seneca Systems is vaguely working on ideas that seem related to what youre talking about but more on the social involvement front as opposed to deep analysis of overlapping laws and semantic deconstruction of how they could be abstracted. theres a few legaltech startups working on westlaw/legal database competitor that i know uses ML to build a large graph database of existing laws and their inter-relationships Fwir
This is because our politicians don’t even read they law they passed or objected. A Democrat will always object a Republican law and vise versa. They will support their own party’s law
The only time you see the politicians opposed their own party is when the party have enough votes AND the politicians is from a state dominated by the other party. For example, a Republican from California.
If politicians have to do their own tax return, I can guarantee you the tax code will be a lot simpler than the 70,000 pages we have.
I'm not sure if automated decisions are a good idea. But it would be really cool to improve productivity of politicians.
How can we expect our politicians, let alone our lay people, to understand all of the law's in a country? There is just too much text to grok.
Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?
Politicians already do use references and bucketization, i.e. write a law for schedule one drugs, then add or remove entities from the schedule one bucket. Can't we abstract even more?
Recently I've been wondering if it is feasible to create a syntax for lawyers. Like a law language with a compiler, package manager and similar tooling to compile laws rather than write them from scratch.
Anyone familiar with such research?