On the flip side, this is exactly what a lot of lawyers do when writing contracts. Not necessarily maliciously or negligently, but it can still make for fun questions of interpretation when things don't go as expected.
Lawyers write code into contracts. Good lawyers try to do so by removing ambiguity where ever they can. Failure to do so results in court cases where that ambiguity is resolved, and in some cases will result in damage for the party that originally contracted them to write the code.
Neither lawyers nor programmers are legally liable for such fuck-ups.
Being able to run test cases through such a construct would be immensely useful - for example, how would changes to health care law impact someone? They could have unit tests that compare different outcomes and make it easier to understand how a new law would change things. People could ask very precise questions about how things would impact them.
Say you own an apartment building with a view of the ocean and I own the plot directly between it and the ocean. I threaten to build a wall that blocks your building's view of the ocean unless you buy my plot for 10x more than its market worth. Should that be legal? Say you succumb to my demand. Should you be able to then sue me and recover the excessive payment? I think many would have the intuition that my threat should not be legal and any resulting contract not valid, since it was extracted by duress.
But how about Firefox selling its search bar to Google for billions of dollars, carrying the implicit threat to use a different default provider should Google not pay. That seems more fair than the previous example, but why?
And how do you formulate that difference into a hard rule, without relying on human beings' (i.e. judge and jury) intuitions of fairness and equity?
Here is what the Restatement of Contracts has to say:
(1) A threat is improper if
(a) what is threatened is a crime or a tort, or the
threat itself would be a crime or a tort if it
resulted in obtaining property,
(b) what is threatened is a criminal prosecution,
(c) what is threatened is the use of civil process
and the threat is made in bad faith, or
(d) the threat is a breach of the duty of good faith
and fair dealing under a contract with the
recipient.
(2) A threat is improper if the resulting exchange is
not on fair terms, and
(a) the threatened act would harm the recipient and
would not significantly benefit the party making
the threat,
(b) the effectiveness of the threat in inducing the
manifestation of assent is significantly
increased by prior unfair dealing by the party
making the threat, or
(c) what is threatened is otherwise a use of power
for illegitimate ends.
And look at (2)(c), "otherwise a use of power for illegitimate ends". What does that even mean? It's basically a surrender, acknowledging that it is impossible to formulate a rule ex ante that totally captures our notions of fairness as they should be applied in every possible situation.
My language is a little sloppy here. There are plenty of legal rules that lawyers would call bright-line rules. But they'll usually still fall short of something that can evaluated in software, as a programmer might expect of a rule so-described.
He explained some of the many reasons why that’s an exceedingly difficult problem. Together we reasoned that it would be possible to implement some degree of machine checking and automation, but that an expert human would always need to review the results, because it’s humans who interpret the laws & contracts.
Lawyers can be held liable if they do a horrible enough job. Likewise for programmers, and there are a lot of people advocating for strict liability for software defects in commercial products/services.
They can be but it rarely happens. The most likely outcome is that another lawyer (or even the same one) will send you another large bill to try to fix the problem. This too is roughly analogous to what happens in programming.