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Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but completely disagree with both the idea and the probability that this will ever happen.

Modern law is supposed to be open, so that anyone can read it. Reencoding laws, for whatever reason, strikes me as being fundamentally undemocratic.

The argument can be made that if legal "code" is taught in schools, then it's no more undemocratic than writing down law, but the chances of that happening seem slim to none.

Another argument is that law is already written in "special" English that most people can't figure out, but I think that having it in English alone is a big step toward having it being readable by almost anyone.

It would be neat to have law written as code and to have AI be able to parse it for you in lay language -- that is, you could ask it questions or pose situations to get a legally-binding answer. But then the question for me is, why don't we just have said AI read the current legalese and parse it?

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Another aspect here is that people think writing contracts as code will eliminate errors. But just look at our software, it's full of bugs. The DAO episode is a perfect example of what will happen with contracts as code: bugs and loopholes, just like now, but harder to address.

Now imagine how buggy legal documents are when they're rewritten fresh each time, rather than using open source libraries and subroutines.

I don't think that's quite right. There is often a "standard" way write certain things. Then there's a bug exposed - that wording lost in a court case. Now people stop using that wording. They try different alternate wordings. Eventually, there's kind of a convergence on a new "standard" way to write it.

Two disclaimers. First, IANAL. Second, "standard" really means "a lot of people do it this way", not "this is recognized as the right way to do it".

Luckily things are interpreted by human judges who can use discretion and interpret things in a sort of "do what I mean" way, so "bugginess" isn't as big of an issue as it is in coding.

this is the crux of the thing.

Well, until we reach smarter-than-human AI, you ultimately have to base everything in society on trust. That's why I actually find the ideas around trustless systems to be potentially dangerous.

Discretion of a human judge is grease on the gears of law.

This is as true as ever changing compiler extensions like undefined behaviour optimizations have proven a success for maintainable and portablility.

Legal documents are hardly "rewritten fresh each time". Lawyers have standard legal templates for things like contracts for example, where only few things change.

Moreover the content and legal rules predetermines what will be written in such legal documents down to the phrasing. While there will be differences, it's not "free writing"/"express yourself" kind of thing.

In software, it's considered poor coding practice for code to be repeated more than once. If lawyers use templates so often and only a few things change, why don't they employ something similar? E.g. here's standardLeaseContract(); difference1(); difference2(); difference3();

To me it seems this would make things much clearer to parties involved, and reduce opportunities for abuse compared to many pages of boilerplate and only a few lines that matter.

Because as in software, so in law, you must deliver an end product that has the instructions expanded with the differences included in. You don't give templates, you dive the rendered result. A tech savvy law firm could of course use templates to define what that would be.

That said, a lot of state law is kind of like what you describe. An initial law, and tons of differences applied on it. E.g. article 3242 clarifies article 432 and adds the provision to do so and so.

Except this doesn't happen. If a lawyer plots a 1k+ page contract down on your table to sign, he probably didn't write it from scratch for you. If the lawyer has been at this for a while, he or she has a list of likely vary similar contracts that they drew most of the language from and then modified for the needs of you and the other entities (we don't like the clause, we want to be protected against this, etc.).

> Modern law is supposed to be open, so that anyone can read it.

This is already not the case -- at least in a common law system like is practiced in most of the US (and other Anglo-Saxon countries). Even if a normal person can understand the legalese, they can't be expected to know about the history of court cases that have reinterpreted and redefined the laws in question in various ways.

Why else would it take so much training to become a lawyer?

I must disagree, not having the implications of laws obvious and runnable and checkable by anyone owning a computer is a big impediment to the democratic ideal. To have interpretations running in the brain of a specialized workers takes away from the ideal that anyone can know plainly what are the implications of laws. These laws can tie into economic models and make the ethical choices a law makes more obvious and checkable by anyone. There is are parallel between mathematical proof checking and computer proofs where flaws, loop holes in arguments can be more easily checked for. It also allows one to run counter simulations for alternative laws. And ideally can allow us to shift away from representative democracy to a more direct form allowing anyone to contribute to laws when they can show the new law can be better in some practical utilitarian ethical model. It also forces us to make our models of what a free ethical society should be more concrete rather than sticking to abstract buzzwords with open interpretations. Just a personal opinion.

It's a common misconception that the law can be so fine-grained. As the saying goes, the law is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. If you look at cases with even a modicum of detail, you very quickly find situations which don't cleanly submit to classification. Code isn't very good at dealing with edge cases or fuzzy inputs.

Similarly, applying rigid code to law can make some crazy results, like the guy who got 25 years for stealing a slice of pizza. It was his 'third strike', and because the slice was stolen from a minor, it was classified as a felony. No sane person would argue for 25 years for a slice of pizza. However, the 'hardcoded' law demanded that, so the people are left picking up the bill for 25 years of imprisonment over a $1 food item (independent of any moral arguments on the issue).

Finally, 'ethics' is ridiculously hard to clearly classify, and if we can't classify it, we can't encode it.

Not saying that any of this is even remotely easy. Simply pointing out what should be some form of ideal. The laws are not meant to be rigid or hardcoded but to be striving for some ideal. The ideal are the axiomatic input to the systems and thus the center of the flaws in our thinking. Thus society that keep redefining what it means to live in an ideal society by looking at the consequences of our laws. But not considering any of this is simply to avoiding thinking about the consequences of the current state of affairs, where many get disenfranchised by the current system as can been seen quite clearly in racial/economic skews of populations in the prison system. The three strikes law is a perfect example of a law where the consequences of the laws which though not perfectly predictable are also not perfectly unpredictable but a consequence the inherent prejudices of people being arbitrarily enacted into laws with little examination of the consequences. To have an explicit legal system would need the explicit spelling out of these prejudices and at least provide a coherent narrative which can be argued against with data and alternatives.

> To have an explicit legal system would need the explicit spelling out of these prejudices and at least provide a coherent narrative which can be argued against with data and alternatives.

I really can't see how this is so.

What about a law

To claim that law was written in a special dialect, that hardly anyone speaks, but that almost anyone could read it, yet to suggest that noone could learn proper symbolic logic strikes of cognitive dissonance. To propose that it could be broken down to laymen terms by AI, i.e. in a nondeterministic way is questionable as well.

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