Comment by insanitybit
3 years ago
> As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.
I don't see how a language is going to solve this. This isn't really an issue of language, it's an issue with ambiguity in the very intent itself. That's why we have judges, who interpret that intent.
Indeed. Ambiguity in legal codes is a feature that allows them to remain relevant for more than a couple of years, and the formal-law "utopia" that some commenters here appear to desire would be a nightmare if put into practice.
Personally I'd rather have laws that work, are consistent and easily understood if you can follow 'if A then B' logic, even if they have to be updated more often.
Relying on ambiguity is admitting there are no laws, and we rely on the common sense of the people in thr judicial system.
> Relying on ambiguity is admitting there are no laws, and we rely on the common sense of the people in thr judicial system.
What's better:
- relying on the common sense of the people in the judicial system to interpret the intent of the law as it applies to a particular situation,
- or relying on the common sense of legislators to write a precise, unambiguous law that will cover all possible situations without negative unintended consequences, and without the law-writing process being influenced by spureous interests and pressures?
The answer highlight why the law is interpreted as is now, with a body of trained public servants analyzing the particulars of each situation, rather than by fanatics trying to follow the letter of the law.
Languages like this may help clarify the intent of legislators so that it is not twisted by clever lawyers; but a human reviewer should always check the relevance of one law to any particular case, and wether the text corresponds to the original intent as applied to a given situation.
Exactly, it is truly horrifying to think of a law encoded such that it can not be superseded by human interpretation.
They mean disputes go on for years, costing society a lot and enriching intermediaries.
This is a solved program in programming, you hover Child and hit "Go to definition". If it's ambiguous, the lawmakers would get a compile error instead of pushing a broken law. They may even have to pay us for consulting to fix it, depending on how esotrtic the language is, how nice is that!
Legal codes aren't meant to work like programming languages. It is impossible for a legislator to predict how the world will work when their law is applied, and it is highly unlikely that they will anticipate every situation and context in which their law will be invoked.
Judges and juries and lawyers all exist to help us interpret the inexact legal code in a way that is (hopefully usually; but obviously not always) fair and reasonable given the often-nuanced situations at hand.
That doesn't add up with how the average piece of legal code looks. Even when I read a brand new piece of legislature it's an impossible soup of words, attempting to document every possible edge case the legislators thought of. If the point was to leave room for interpretation by a judge and you concede yoy don't have full context of how what you're writing will be applied, surely you could write much more sensible and human-readable text.
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I would be happy if the law conforms to other existing laws, not future edge cases. The solution being proposed here would do that, while the existing system would not.