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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

This project seems to implicitly assume that a formally specified code of laws, where statutes can be interpreted largely mechanistically, is a good thing (and by extension, that the existing system of human interpreters with discretion and margins of error is a problem to be overcome).

I don't disagree with this assumption outright, but it's certainly not obvious to me that it is correct, and the authors appear to present no arguments supporting the same.

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I suspect the motivation of this project is a lot more practical than what you’re projecting onto it, and I suspect you might be discounting how often law is transformed into code that runs on state IT systems.

As someone who is familiar with the process of turning statutes into code, I can appreciate what this project endeavors to do, even if the value is limited to providing clarification for software developers.

It is hugely useful. I worked on implementation of law in code for 10 years and the big problem is this: there's a constant communication between software devs and law poeple. For exmaple "did you code this like that ?", "why did the system did that ?", "if I code this way, does it reflect the law precisely ?". You have to constantly trnaslate from the code base to the language of lawyers and vice versa. Doing that with regular code is no good: regular code ends up mixing law code and technical code. Making a clear separation with a dedicated language is a big plus.

This seems obvious to me and seems something that law already strives to: you end up with very precise law regardless via case law, but with a high legal cost to reach that point. At the very least, it's not something I'd expect to be on Catala's homepage.

I think this is closely related to rule of law too. Per https://www.britannica.com/topic/rule-of-law

> In particular, laws should be open and clear, general in form, universal in application, and knowable to all.... The law should... comprise determinate requirements that people can consult before acting, and legal obligations should not be retroactively established.

What are the benefits of ambiguous laws?

> What are the benefits of ambiguous laws?

That they can deal with the massive amounts of ambiguity & blurred lines / grey areas the world has to offer. Too many of our everyday concepts can’t be expressed rigorously for a formal encoding & determinate decision process - a famous example being obscenity’s famed “I know it when I see it” definition - and many are highly context dependent.

Laws very often look for intent of actions as well as the actions themselves.

And they are ambiguous: "beyond reasonable doubt" is what, as a percentage, in your view?

"What are the benefits of ambiguous laws? "

Freedom and flexibility. Reality is infinitely complex, trying to encode real world problems 100% accurate into code can only work by rounding a lot, with the result of oversimplification with the result of lots of "unjust" rulings, when you do not take the intent of the law into account, but only the words. We have this problem already (a lot) many things that seem very wrong but are legal by the letters of the law.

(Mobsters being released because of formalities for example, even though everyone knee they were guilty)

Can ambiguity be quantified, and/or codified? Risking sounding like a painfully naive layman, would it be possible to define the range in which to apply the rule as function of range of inputs? When uncertaintu on inputs increases or veers outside of some well known range, then bandwidth for the judge increases?

I think something like this exists actually, even though I can't think of a concrete example, but I am sure it is not easy to implement (in a just way) either.

I'd say, it's useful to distinguish between intentional and unintentional ambiguity/underspecification. For example, many jurisdictions that have statutory contract law have a statute that says that a provision in a contract is unenforceable if it is "unconscionable". There is, of course, a broad spectrum of things that can fall under that term, but that's intentional, i.e. the law maker specifically wanted to open a door there for a judge to hold a contractual provision unenforceable if they need it to be to get to a just outcome.

However, a lot of ambiguity, underspecification, and just plain sloppiness in language is there for no good reason and causes problems, and it would obviously be a good thing to get rid of that.

"However, a lot of ambiguity, underspecification, and just plain sloppiness in language is there for no good reason and causes problems, and it would obviously be a good thing to get rid of that."

100% agreed. When clear (and simple) rules are possible, vague rules just create opportunities for shady things. And yes, we have many, many laws that could be made simpler and therefore more clear. And if a programming language can help with that, that would be awesome.

But that doesn't mean freedom or flexibility for citizens. It means freedom and flexibility for the judiciary. For citizens, it takes away their freedom and flexibility because vague or contradictory laws (often coupled with severe penalties) create risk, or the perception of risk, where there wasn't meant to be any to begin with. It causes people to stop trying new things out of fear that Rule By Law will happen to them.

Whose freedom is more important? The people's, or their rulers? If you believe in enlightened rulers, you may legitimately conclude the latter, but for the rest of us, we'd rather the government be properly constrained. After all that's why laws are written down to begin with, it's why there is such a thing as the professional lawmaker.

Vague law is usually not written due to some deep philosophy of law making, after all. Nobody really tries to defend it in practice. It's almost always a result of lazy or politically contentious lawmaking when the people writing the laws don't really know what they want in the first place, so trying to divine their intent will never get you far.

"But that doesn't mean freedom or flexibility for citizens. "

It does, because if laws want to cover every case, they need to be so verbatim and rule out so many possibilities, that in the end, every action is encoded in law, which will result in people only doing things that are explicitely allowed. That limits a lot.

Simple example, despite being an adult, I like to climb trees. And sometimes also in parks. So I had discussions with officials or or wannabe officials about: is this allowed? It turns out, there is no rule allowing it. But there is also usually no rule forbidding it. But most people default to, if it is not explicitely allowed, it must be forbidden (which is a very german thing, but is not unique to us).

Michael de Montagne, a old french philosopher who is also quoted around this thread, put it way better in words. I try to find the passage.

Some laws, like tax bracket computation probably are fine but most laws should not be codified like this in my opinion

The French have a programming language for tax related work: https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang

It fits quite will within French legal tradition. Remember that it was Montesquieu himself who said 'le juge n'est que la bouche de la loi'. When I was working on my law degree, I (being a programmer) was quite interested in this field, and (although my French wasn't/isn't great, so I didn't get to go as deep as I would have liked) I found a large community of such legalistic work in French speaking parts of the world. The professor at my university who was into this sort of stuff also seemed to lean towards that sphere of influence.

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