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Comment by jgfoot | Hacker News Reader

Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If you haven't already, take 30 minutes and read Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Path of the Law" and see if you still think the only obstacle to mechanizing the law is the political power of the legal profession. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373

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I'll give it a look in, but yes, my general opinion is that discretion leads to subjectivity and unfairness. Unfortunately the attempts to reduce discretion have historically resulted in malicious arbitrariness, sentencing teenagers to sex offender status for sexting, silly three strikes laws ad et al. At the same time it seems to me that a more richly detailed granular objective system with oversight into the actual code to any interested parties with a clear and concise method for changing that code would be a far superior approach than either of the previously mentioned extremes.

You might want to look into the civil code system of law. It might appeal to you more than the English-derived system that I suspect you live under. Check out the Quebec Civil Code: http://www2.publicationsduquebec.gouv.qc.ca/dynamicSearch/te... (ignore the bizarre English translations of some concepts...).

You are correct, I currently live under a common law derived system, and my research into actually translating a legal system to code has led me to believe that the best place to start would be a civil law based system, though I had been mostly looking into scandinavian countries prior to this link. Thanks for that, just to be clear though, is civil code specific to Quebec or is it all of Canada on a civil law derived system? If it's Quebec only I'm guessing my grasp of English isn't much going to help me but if it's all of Canada I'm thinking this could be a much better starting point than the Scandinavian systems as I don't speak any of those languages fluently.

The Civil Code is just in Quebec. That's because that region of the country was originally owned by France and centuries later it's still French-speaking and uses a France-derived legal system for all but criminal matters.

There are many English speakers in Quebec (one of Canada's top law schools is located in the largest city in Quebec, which is known for being English-speaking...) and so you should be able to find a lot more materials in English than Scandinavian countries but I wouldn't know.

You're likely already aware of it but Louisiana also has the historical France link and civil code connection but I know much less about how that system works.

> attempts to reduce discretion have historically resulted in malicious arbitrariness

You're 90% of the way to the answer. Take into account Hanlon's Razor and it should become clear.

Unless the people designing the law are smart enough to take into account every single edge case, we're faced with a choice between gross miscarriages of justice through inflexible laws, and gross miscarriages of justice through incompetent or corrupt judges.

We know the people designing the law aren't that smart; and even if they were, the laws are already too complicated. The only solution is to strike a balance between the two types of errors that minimizes their sum.

Also, you're focusing on statutory law. There is a whole, great, big, huge area of law that is contracts made between two arms-length parties.

Very little of what I do as a lawyer involves interpreting or applying specific statutory laws.

How much of this is a characteristic of law, in general, and how much of this is a characteristic of the English common-law tradition?

In a civil-law system where laws and regulations are more minutely detailed, and judges have less discretion, would law-as-computer code be more feasible?

Perhaps _more_ feasible, but not feasible enough. In German law schools they make it sound as if there's only one legal interpretation for every case, but actually there are often competing ones.

Also, even if the legal situation is clear, there's still discretion involved to decide which claim ranks higher. E.g. Free Speech versus (something like) Right to Privacy in the case you can see at http://lexetius.com/1999,2324 . (If you don't speak German, Google translate might be good enough.)

To me the practice of common law and civil law seem more similar than their theory.

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