> and will be
strong doubt.
laws are by definition supposed to be „soft” and not hardcoded. see the smart contract hacks.
this simply doesn’t happen in law, because the spirit plays a large role, and the spirit is something that cannot be coded
strong doubt.
laws are by definition supposed to be „soft” and not hardcoded. see the smart contract hacks.
this simply doesn’t happen in law, because the spirit plays a large role, and the spirit is something that cannot be coded
There are lots of drafting disputes about things where someone wrote something like
> a and b or c
leading lawyers to argue about whether this should be read as ((a and b) or c) or (a and (b or c)).
There's no reason that this kind of ambiguity should have been permitted to exist in the first place.
I think my understanding of this is related to my understanding of Lojban, which tries to avoid all syntactic ambiguities but explicitly says that it's a non-goal to avoid ambiguities related to the cultural meaning of words and concepts. Like if you say something is "medieval" or "fun" or "convenient" or "beautiful" or "fair" or "postmodern", Lojban doesn't try to make the truth-conditions for your statement objective with regard to what these concepts do or don't refer to. But to the extent that that's agreed between two people, they should then agree on what a particular sentence using these concepts means or doesn't mean.
Though I do envision that when people use better tools for avoiding parsing ambiguities in legal texts, they will still argue (and there will be many legal philosophers insisting) that they should still be permitted to argue that something was still a drafting error, because the (only permitted) interpretation under the drafting formalism is manifestly unfair or unreasonable and could not have captured their true intention.
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/4519/
https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/29/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8axPLLxhjQFWGc0ellBYTF3RnM...
The law is (nowdays) is backed by writing, and since I think that computing is a next step in the evolution of writing (along with printing press) one day---likely in dozens of generations (hundreds of years)---the law will be backed by computing.
All these technologies change the nature of a human's consiouness; it will take hundreds of years. Look at Walter Ong's work for better made arguments along these lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong
Some exceptions to the above are: 1. Financial contracts (see ISDA derivatives). They're written with a big "human" document upfront and then there's a "notification addendum" attached to each use of that contract. 2. Master Sales Agreements (MSAs): The first MSA is a human-to-human agreement. Everything after that is order-forms. And negotiating the MSA requirements is very very human (risk, trust, effort, cost, benefit & promises). Order forms are pricing decisions that can be "automated" (especially around annual renewals if within budget without red flags).
so does law.