Comment by Supply5411
3 years ago
Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear, understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.
3 years ago
Very cool. Pessimistically, I think that having a clear, understandable view of legal text so that people can navigate the law safely is against a lot of entrenched interests.
That's far too reductive. The law is abstract, and still needs to be interpreted and prudentially applied to specific situations, and you cannot capture all of that in the law a priori. Furthermore, having a computer crunch through a bunch of predicates is easy compared to getting the facts expressed in a form that is crunchable. So for specific and narrow applications where such representations are not costly to produce or already exist, such an application of computational law is feasible. But broadly? No.
And then there's the distinction between lex and ius that I think needs to be considered in this context.
I don't think it's that. It's hard to write legal texts, and sometimes it's better to be vague, so the courts have some freedom when establishing jurisprudence.
Treaties can be written with vague wording to allow parties to sign it, even if there isn't 100% agreement. That's an old practice.
On the contrary, it's much better to have very clear text, otherwise it will turn against the citizen.
Imagine that you have an income tax where "income" isn't clearly defined. Someone will end up with an audit and a lawsuit from the tax office because their definition will be, of course, extensive (every income, including non-realized capital gains) whereas most citizens would only consider salaries.
In the end, you create legal uncertainty, and give courts way too much power.
For the record, I used to work for my country's government, and had to evaluate some laws in making that were written in an abstruse way. When I asked why, the civil servant told me that it was so "they could pick the most favorable meaning in the case of a lawsuit".
It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve. Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little scenario.
So there are different tiers to deal with this.
- Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed.
- Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific.
- Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended for broad application.
- Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.
It is probably better to be intentionally and clearly unclear when you want to be, and clearly algorithmic when you want that, than just stir it all together in the name of judicial discretion.
I don't think the example given increases legibility.
Programming tends to use less understandable but more precise verbiage in general.