try {
fair (trail);
} catch (e) {
if (e == InconsistentLawException) {
// Oops, divided by zero,
// add a tiny epsilon to the denominator and keep going
law += epsilon;
} else if (e == ClassCastException) {
// some types are more equal than others
settlement (trail);
} else {
// escalate to higher instance
mapReduce (court);
}
} finally {
// might silently fail if
// higher_instance == SCOTUS and
// SCOTUS.busy == true
sentence (trial) . await (appeal (higherinstance));
}The problem with this line of reasoning is that it leads down the wrong path. Formally verifying the consistency of the law cannot be done in practice because it has NP-complete problems inside of it. The amount of work it would take to create a legal code which is internally consistent and always yields an agreeable outcome is not feasible.
But it's foolish to go from there to the other pole where all the laws are overly broad and the only thing that determines whether you go to jail is prosecutorial discretion.
The formally-verified internally-consistent always-righteous version of the law is the unattainable platonic ideal. You never actually get there but progress is measured by whether we get closer today than we were yesterday.
Always righteous wasn't required by OP, but ideally it's a mere consequence of consistency. If you preclude Consistency, the apriori
Is there something you can cite here? The infeasible thing to me is refactoring a pre-existing lawbase into something formally verifiable; if we could throw it all away and start over at the constitution, it might work.
You can easily pass a law that says all killing is illegal, but that isn't good enough. You either have to consider every possible thing that could happen in the universe and encode what should happen in each case into the law, which is clearly infeasible, or there will be things that can happen which you haven't considered ahead of time, and then you still have to specify something.
If what you specify is that unanticipated acts are illegal then everyone will be in prison. But if they aren't then it will be easy to find a provable loophole to murder. Neither of those is acceptable.
That's why we have judges. To address that. But that answer is still terrible because then you don't know what the law is until you're already in court. It's just less terrible than either putting everyone in prison or letting anyone get away with murder.
Which means the goal is to minimize the number of situations where that needs to happen, without causing the well-specified outcomes to be unrighteous.