Comment by kstrauser

4 days ago

It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...

These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.

If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?

"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.

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kstrauser

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jcranmer  4 days ago

Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.

The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.

Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.

  • philipallstar  3 days ago

    > Law doesn't work like that

    This is partly because the law predates compilers and modern communication. Why should a crime get different sentences? Often because judges are humans and somehow that makes it okay to lock some people up for years longer than others.

    • tptacek  3 days ago

      No it isn't, at least not in common law systems like the US. It is part of the principle of how statutes are drafted that they will be interpreted by human judges and shaped by precedent. It's not a technological limitation.

    • jcranmer  3 days ago

      Your example is somewhat apropos because one of the more algorithmic portions of law is sentencing. Since the 1980s (i.e., after the development of compilers!), the US has enacted guidelines for sentencing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci...) that allows anyone to read the criminal complaint and compute the expected sentence via a calculator (e.g., https://www.sentencing.us/).

      And yet the sentencing guidelines are not binding on outcomes, in part because of the necessary flexibility in law. Sometimes you crunch the numbers and you get absurd results (SBF's fraud conviction is a good example I ran through myself), and so you need the flexibility to throw the algorithm out when the algorithm produces wrong results.

nerdsniper  4 days ago

> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place

> These things are knowable

There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined.

Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions.

Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and appeals courts / state supreme courts can rule quite inconsistently.

That’s by definition not just undefined behavior but also non-deterministic results.

  • kstrauser  4 days ago

    I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state, at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.

    • dchftcs  4 days ago

      Someone has to be in the news first, and then you learn about it. To that someone, the change you see in tomorrow's legal news is today, was yesterday. It's more a gamble than you think, you just don't feel it until it bites you.

      1 reply →

    • hnfong  3 days ago

      Well, to put it precisely, an omniscient being would theoretically be capable of knowing today's state of the law with probabilities assigned to the results.

      I'm serious. Pick any non-trivial issues of law, ask a world leading expert, and you'd very quickly hear the word "probably" somewhere. Less often than "it depends", but you'll hear those words often nonetheless.

      If that's "knowable" to you, I guess it's knowable.