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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers are probably a big one. Most people think they spend all day in the courtroom, but many lawyers never set foot in a courtroom. Instead, their days are spent meeting with clients and preparing documents: their job is to translate the plain-English requirements of what the clients want to agree upon into legalese that has specific meaning in court.

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So law is in a way programming?

That's one reason why the tax code is a perfect domain for computer assistance (read: Intuit).

It's writing (legal) code that you can run on judges.

Lol.

For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.

The fun part is that there is a positive correlation between having bugs and having your code run on a judge.

Except that very little of the code (e.g. contracts) that get written ever run and the people who debug the code (litigators) aren't the same people who wrote it in the first place. Also the people who wanted the code written in the first place have never actually read it are convinced it says something different to what it actually does say....

It would be an interesting project to create an artificial court/judge into which you feed a contract and an argument and get a response out.

So it's like programming?

Programming where you never run your code.

Like programming, but far worse.

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