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Comment by someguy101010 | Hacker News Reader

Law is absolutely not something I would like to be programmatic. The nice thing about having a human being presiding over human affairs is that they can prevent you from using exploits in the letter of the law in the spirit of the law.

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Well this is what the smart contract / Ethereum folks are setting out to do. I think they will soon run into the fact that the function of the legal system is not to run through some obfuscated flow chart but to identify edge cases and resolve them by debating the original intent of the law. This is what happened during the DAO hack when they had to fork the chain because everyone agreed thats not what was supposed to happen.

Contracts, whether “smart” or not, also need a mechanism for enforcement.

Legal systems and the people who run them fulfill that function; I’m skeptical you could engineer that away.

You could have both (we're talking theoretically, I'm not holding my breath...): an automatic public API that answers queries, but final judgements would have to be approved by a human, sort of an automatic no-action letter. It would make public administration much more transparent while retaining a safety valve for corner cases.

Slightly OT, but while I understand the notion that it's desirable to have at least some form of "do what I mean, not what I say" baked into the system, in practice exploits happen where the law is being used for political bullshit as opposed to legitimate regulation.

I don't regard laws that are unclear, unenforceable or overly reliant on judicial interpretation to be serving the public good.

I still think the right to be seen before a judge is integral to the justice system. Automating it to the point where judges are simply rubber-stamping decisions ignores the gravity of legal proceedings and their effect on people's lives.

Sure, but wouldn't it be nice if you could comprehend the law without having a human (which is also really expensive to hire)? Even filing a fairly simple tax return is still a mindfield in some developed countries.

You could also make software programmatic, because it suffers from the same problem.

True, but ultimately it would be a step towards democratization.

Nobody's stopping you from learning to read legal documents. Regardless, I wouldn't call computer code any less impenetrable than the code of law--it'd just be more up your alley if it was the former.

I believe the advantage of having “law as software” would not necessarily be the increased readability of the documents, but the ability to simulate outcomes / ask questions about the law and get an automated answer instead of having an expert as the bottleneck.

So, instead of needing a lawyer to comprehend the law, you'll need to be a programmer.

I'm not sure this solves any of the problems you are setting out to solve. I am sure that this, however, will create a lot of new problems.

You could have programmatic contracts where the actions and considerations can be manual, but the state of the contract is automatic.

> The nice thing about having a human being presiding over human affairs is that they can prevent you from using exploits in the letter of the law in the spirit of the law.

You mean how large companies cannot evade the spirit of tax laws because a human will stop them from doing so?

There's a reason the IRS has teeth. Most of the time, it's very effective.

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