Axiom Foundation launches to publish law as open, verifiable code
axiom.org
axiom.org
Have wondered whether attorneys would find it easier to work in a programming language than english, once they'd learned the former? Do any have strong opinions on this?
A lot of legal language looks like code, sure. It can be formulaic and full of terms of art ("actual malice" has nothing to do with colloquial malice, for example) but law just isn't code.
Laws themselves are basically human drama run through a compression algorithm. They get written by all kinds of people at all different times for all different reasons. Case law is also law, and that's hundreds of years of people fighting in court lol.
When you hire a lawyer, you're asking them to take all of that and apply it to your hyperspecific set of facts, in such a way that you'd probably win if someone wanted to fight you in court about it.
Also, the stakes in law are high. You usually get one (1) shot at litigating something and that's it. No do overs.
Oh dear. The one source of truth is the statute.
Some paragraphs or articles might be temporary amended/repelled by a Constitutional court, or have some related case law, so there must be links or notes.
Just to give you an idea, here is an example of a "proper" commercial law search system with notes and hyperlinks (in Russian, but Firefox translates it without issues): [1]. I noticed that the German system has no markup, so the German site feels like working with code in a notepad, without coloring and "go to definition" after using an IDE. Or like trying to read law from a gazette/journal of legislative acts.
[1] https://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_37119/823a1b...
The fact that everyone is jumping through so many silly hoops now that they're writing code non-deterministically should serve as a hint, but it doesn't seem to be.
Beliefs, unlike theories, are not subject to disproof. There's a well-understood human tendency of people to react to dissonance by denying reality and intensifying their beliefs. This is a large part of why rational science was viewed with such hostility by the church: adopting the scientific method as a belief is a memetic immunization of sorts against belief cults, which depend greatly on self-reinforcing processes triggered by doubt. Teaching people to doubt belief without intensifying it is the ultimate heresy.
The U.S. in specific does an atrocious job of teaching critical questioning of beliefs, for various reasons that are subject to their own independent arguments. The U.S. in specific also churns out a great many techies who believe that the law is code, and many of those launch into an Icarus parabola under the unyielding sunlight of judicial discretion. One might evaluate a theory of causation between those two factors by studying whether Stanford explicitly teaches how to apply the Scientific Method to beliefs to Business and Finance graduates, and then contrasting the crash and burn rate of graduates among a representative sample of colleges divided along that line.