Comment by rayiner
13 years ago
Interpretation isn't an unguided, irrational process. When your lawyer answers "it depends" its because you've placed him at one point in what's really a decision tree and asked him: "where does it end?" It's like asking a programmer whether a particular token in a C++ program is a type name or an identifier. It depends.
If you imagine the universe of human activity as a multi-dimensional space, you can think of laws as carving out subspaces with lines (that may be more or less fuzzy) and attaching significance to particular subspaces. If I ask: "my x coordinate is 5, where am I?" what do you answer?
For the answer, see my future law review paper "A complete multi dimensional polytope model of US law"
I'm not writing one of those either :-)
...although there's been some interesting work from Dan Katz at UMich summarizing progress in this area http://computationallegalstudies.com/