English, specifically whatever dialect that is, is a horrible medium for encoding laws.
Further, the diffing format used there is atrocious.
Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?
Further, the diffing format used there is atrocious.
Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?
Properly drafted English-language laws do read as code. It's like how you can describe formal logic in English: "All Americans wear hats. I am an American. Therefore I wear a hat."
I take it you're arguing for something like Lojban, though. I see two problems there. First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land. Second, and probably more incurably, these types of languages don't remove the most important kinds of ambiguity in laws.
Most disputes over ambiguity in legal text do not arise from syntactic ambiguity. It's not usually confusion over what words the "not" modifies, or which "if" is nested within which. Rather, most problems arise from semantic ambiguity, i.e. the meaning of the individual words. What constitutes a "bank," exactly? What does it mean to do something "in a reasonable period of time?" If you're "bearing" arms, where exactly are you bearing them?
You might argue that the problem then comes down to defining your terms well. That's certainly a noble goal when drafting legal text. But one of the principle goals of legal drafting is to make the text flexible enough to apply to specific circumstances that the authors could not have foreseen. This, of course, is in constant tension with the need to be precise. The more precise you are, the easier it is to interpret the law, but the more likely it is that someone will find a loophole arising from the excessive narrowness of your language.
A language like Lojban won't alleviate these difficulties, unfortunately.
Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand, and makes the same problem. I think it's more accessible to run something through a compiler...
This is why I'm against EULAs. As a non-lawyer, it's an asymmetrical game--I have no idea what the legaleese I'm agreeing to actually means in a court.
No it doesn't.
Does that mean all legal drafting is clear? No. But much of it is sufficiently clear for a literate person to understand. By way of example, I've chosen a passage from the Illinois criminal code, more or less at random:
"Theft of property not from the person and not exceeding $500 in value is a Class 4 felony if the theft was committed in a school or place of worship or if the theft was of governmental property."
This is a typical example of legalese. It bakes several conditions into one sentence: 1) not from the person, 2) value under $500, 3) in a school, 4) in a place of worship, 5) on government property. Most legal writing I've encountered is at roughly this level of complexity.
Certainly, there's a lot of logic packed into that one sentence. There's much more to parse out than there is in a typical newspaper sentence. But I'm willing to bet most people can read that law and understand what it means. (Not that you'd necessarily know what a Class 4 felony is. But you'd know some of the circumstances under which a theft qualifies as one.)
If we were to make everything be written in normal English, the same problem would eventually re-emerge.
For RM, the 'broken' differencing format was a feature, not a bug. It allowed him to slip though all kinds of law changes without people understanding what he was up to. The book has many, many examples of exactly this differencing format being put to use to gain power.
The point about the differencing format is more broadly true - prior to reading the book, I thought politics was about having the right ideas, and explaining them clearly. But the book compellingly argues that politics is really about obtaining and wielding power. The people who thrive in politics are more interested in power than ideas.
It is a book that is well worth reading, especially if you are an idealistic programmer (like I was) who cannot understand why we can't just 'clean politics up.' (Also, Caro's LBJ biography is awesome, with similar themes.)
This should be the preface to every history book. BTW, s/politics/business/ and it is still true.
Not to say that politics and business are not interested in ideas... they are, but not fundamentally. Ideas are only a means to power. Understand this and you will understand much about an idea you wish to see implemented.
Because lawyers love buggy code.
Compared to what, exactly?
> Further, the diffing format used there is atrocious.
That's a really common problem.
> Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?
Mostly, because there is no first party money in it, and there's considerable expense to do it as a third-party solution, because of exactly the problem that this is directed at solving.
There's quite a bit of money in third-party solutions, which are provided by several vendors to the people who have the money and motivation to pay for them (people who professionally deal with the law), as components of wider research suites that cover more than just statute law (including many copyright-protected sources).
Third-party solutions that use only the free-of-copyright public information don't have a lot of market, and would have a lot of expense to create and maintain (not the system, so much as keeping the data current.)
You might be interested in this experiment:
https://github.com/divegeek/uscode
(Federal code, not state.)
1. http://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1994/en19940543.pdf