Comment by AgentMatt
9 hours ago
If law was code, there would be no need for judges to make decisions. Instead, a "judge" would be someone making a mechanical derivation of the judgement given the situation and the law.
The law is rather a complex set of guidelines which need to leave some space for interpretation, so that additional relevant information for the situation at hand can affect the decision.
Law is literally code, and xml in the sense that it attempts to define itself as well as it's payload, and everything you said was exactly the point.
What is a sandwich?
> Law is literally code
Only the legislated part of law is codified. In our American common law system, case law is, by definition, uncodified. So what judges are doing, is taking the codified legislation, and applying case law decisions in layers on top, to reach a final decision.