Comment by dathinab

3 years ago

programmers love to propose using "programming language" or similar for law

But this fails to realize that _ambiguity (in some ways) is a fundamental important part of law_.

This is because the world itself is fundamental ambiguous (in some ways)/clear cut.

Naturally not all ways of ambiguity are wanted.

But you can be sure that with "code as law" the ways loopholes are abused will get worse in my opinion.

I would even go as far that some many laws should be more focused on what should be upheld then the details how (which is fundamental less clear cut/more ambiguous).

10 comments

dathinab

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unethical_ban  3 years ago

Agreed. Although I don't think this is a bad idea, I think of the idea of perfectly defined laws and perfectly enforceable laws are terrifying. If every law on the books today were able to be perfectly enforced and perfectly monitored, our lives would be utterly miserable.

I'm not going to argue that's a problem with laws vs. enforcement, but either way, our society is built around ambiguity and unequal enforcement of law.

  • dathinab  3 years ago

    I'm not speaking about perfect enforcement.

    But about that law, in difference to what movies love to pretend, is not about clever word tricks and nit-picking formulations.

    (In court it still can be about clever arguing, including nit picking arguments if necessary.)

    But code _is_ about nit picking formulations at least if we ignore documentation, naming conventions etc. but lock solely at what the code does.

    Code is meant to be precise.

    Law is meant to be only as precise as necessary but no more then that. Or you could say it's meant to be as imprecise as viable.

    Code is about the specific case (in general).

    Law is about the generic case (in general), avoiding specific cases where possible.

    Code is made for machines to consume.

    Law is meant to be consumed with ambiguous defined context of the situations in (human) .

    This is so deeply rooted in law that I would argue it's (in general, with exceptions) not possible to translate any current laws to code without accidentally changing their meaning in a lot of subtle but meaningful cases.

  • nvm0n2  3 years ago

    Enforcement and clarity are different concepts. We don't have a big problem with courts or police declining to enforce laws because they aren't precise enough.

  • brutusborn  3 years ago

    Do you have any examples where ambiguity is truly beneficial?

    For all the examples I can think of, the most beneficial outcome is removing the law altogether.

    • dathinab  3 years ago

      Two easy examples:

      - Fair use law (there are thinks which clearly are and are not fair use but in between there is huge gray area where you can not really formulate generic precise rules which work reliable).

      - Parent law (which has a lot of issues especially given how it's applied, but design wise you fundamentally have ambiguity about questions like when something is "enough added innovation" to be patentable as fundamentaly "the degree of inovativeness" is purely subjective.)

      - Insult, is also very subjective. Define it as "only when insult was intented" would be bad, but similar would be "always when the person felt insulted" and even "if intended and felt insulted" has issues.

      - Self defense it's in many jurisdiction based on the person feeling threatened, but in jurisdictions with sane law it also involves stuff like "a generic person would also have felt threatened", but then you still have to consider person specific circumstances.

      - or lot of stuff around what counts as insider information, e.g. for insider trading

brutusborn  3 years ago

I don't think there is any reason ambiguity would clash with a project like this. Take "value.fair_market" in the concepts section [0]. Sure, lawyers can argue over what this means, but these competing definitions can also be defined programmatically.

I agree with your idea that our interest in laws shouldn't focus on implementation details but I think they should focus on outcomes. This requires a method to produce an evaluation function to measure the outcomes of a new law, and a system such as Catala to help model expected outcomes and to help select between competing laws (eg if our outcome = "we want less pollution" then our policy might be "ban polluting industries" or "tax pollution externalities." Both have complex consequences which would be better analyzed automatically and measured empirically.)

[0] https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#concepts