Comment by spicybright
5 years ago
Knee jerk reaction, I don't think a programming language will benefit law in any capacity.
If there's a dispute around existing code, who's going to translate it to Catala?
If there's legal reason to write a specific program for something, why wouldn't that be some kind of patent or similar?
The only English example (US Tax Code) has a broken link too, "source code files of the example", so I can't even see that.
Idk. Just doesn't seem useful from what I see so far.
A healthy dose of skepticism seems certainly warranted. I would like to share an example that I hope illustrates the potential of using programming languages to formalize legal reasoning, or at least one possible usage scenario. Take for instance Article 14 of the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR), available in its entirety from:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
Article 14 mandates that a technical system be built and states, among other requirements:
"Where competent authorities lawfully issue, in their own Member State and in an electronic format that allows automated exchange, evidence that is relevant for the online procedures referred to in paragraph 1, they shall also make such evidence available to requesting competent authorities from other Member States in an electronic format that allows automated exchange."
The core of this task is therefore to translate evidences between different European Member States. It would be nice to formalize this in the form of logical rules that clearly state which documents can be used to establish the necessary evidences. For instance, the contents of an Austrian birth certificate could be used to prove a required age to a different Member State. The logical rules could take changes in legislation and data formats into account without requiring a redeployment of the entire system, if there is a way to read and interpret the rules dynamically.
Thanks for pointing out the broken link, I just fixed it : https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala-website/commit/a5c4157a....
Your question is spot-on; for me the Catala code has to be officially published from the government service that uses it to apply a piece of law automatically with a legal expert system : tax administration, social benefits administration, etc.
If you disagree with the code, then I guess you could sue the administration in court. The legal process for that depends on the country though.
I don't have the references at hand, but I've seen a few rulings now for smart contract disputes along the lines of: "The contract is legal in and of itself, and part of the contract is to be bound to whatever decisions the code makes so long as that decision is itself legal."
The status quo now is that if I have a contract dispute with a big corporation I'm probably SOL as they will bury me under lawyers. But if I can get a summary judgment saying "hey, the code says he's right, pay up BigCo." Suddenly the courts are a lot more accessible to me.
Not saying this will be a net win for the little man (automation usually isn't) but there may be some benefits, which is interesting.
it has to chain back to reality eventually though.
the courts have had to rule over whether action figures are toys or dolls, because those had different tariffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States
you can make an incredibly verbose smart contract but lawyers will weasel about the inputs like this.
Sure, I don't think my post disagrees with that. You're discussing regulation. I only referred to a very particular type of legal case: a contract dispute between two private parties wherein the contract is legally valid and the parties have agreed to abide by the determination of the program.
Not all law will be like this, it's too complicated, but some of it might be and that's interesting.
> I don't think a programming language will benefit law in any capacity.
It sounds like your concept of law is rather static. Don't you think human society will eventually start to create "law" that doesn't follow the traditional model of imprecisely expressed statements, expressed in a weird bastardization of natural language?