Comment by vthriller
5 years ago
How do those similar projects actually handle ambiguously written laws? All that I see in Catala paper is basically "let this whole thing bounce back and forth between lawyer and programmer until it becomes unambiguous."
To be honest I don't really know in detail. There is an interesting paper about "Computational Law": http://logic.stanford.edu/publications/genesereth/complaw.pd... which says (§3):
Computational Law derives its power from its emphasis on deductive reasoning. As such, it simply cannot be applied in cases requiring analogical or inductive reasoning. Fortunately, it is sometimes the case that there are enough judicial rulings that the net result is, in effect, a set of categorical constraints even where the original wording of the regulations is not definitive. And, in such cases, Computational Law can be applied to the combination of regulatory and judicial law.
I guess this is why the French programmers are concentrating on the tax code which might be more precisely written!
Hi, Catala author here :) Totally, tax law is usually the most precisely written. But it's still ambiguous as Sarah Lawsky points out https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2987065