Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/

No, law is not code and it’s very important that it’s not code. Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great. When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?

The key part is that the court system can correct for a bug before the law itself is changed; it's a way to fix things as the code is being executed for a particular case, before the developers have even identified how/if the bug applies for other cases and figured out a general fix, much less implemented one.

In each case it may depend upon the 'application'.

For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early.

Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues.

All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.

Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this debate into new territory.

(TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open-source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.)

Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should...

The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court".

How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def...

There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha...

Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517

Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch-perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versi...

Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github.

I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open-standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app.

Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is not the customer -- as Atrium proved, expensively.

To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! <3) to hire people to make it happen. https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singapo...

(Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?...

If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: https://computational.law/hiring

I can see the attraction in making rules/regulation as code. But there is a downside we should be cautious of. Making law into code doesn't necessarily make it more readable/understandable or clearer for humans. In fact, making it into code will make it scalable to add lots of rules (very prescriptive, not derivable from a set of core principles) making them hard to comprehend for anyone but a rules evaluation engine. Anyone who has implemented a business rules engine and operated it in a complex workflow domain (like say e-commerce or banking) knows what I'm talking about. Then, when the machine renders judgement, we will need technical engineers to debug/explain/interpret why the machine evaluated all the rules to this particular judgement. There will also be potential for modeling the legal context of a particular case incorrectly while feeding it to the machine which can make the machine render incorrect judgment. Now, how will you appeal this decision?

You're quite right. Garbage in, garbage out. And if the cost of generating garbage goes down, we're going to get a lot more of it! There are definite risks in misinterpretation and complexity and cruft. As Genesereth quoted:

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.

So, we will have be on our guard. The hope is that if the rules are open and machine-readable, we will be able to counter with software that sides with the user and helps to mount the sort of response that in the past was only available to corporations with very deep pockets.

One intriguing approach is to submit test cases: concrete scenarios, or traces of events, that should result in certain desired outcomes. A diverse range of people in different circumstances could be collected in a comprehensive test suite. If the contract/law passes the test suite, you're good! You can imagine two legislators from different parties with different constituents and concerns, each bringing their set of test cases; and when the negotiated compromise passes enough tests, they proceed, without ever actually reading the text of the bill, lol.

> If the contract/law passes the test suite, you're good!

Not necessarily, you risk the same sort of problems suffered by naïve statisticians who over-fit their data with ever more complicated models. This leads to erratic behaviour in real life and severe lack of predictability outside the range already covered by the data.

You need to run some kind of sensitivity analysis as well because the components used in the implementation (policemen, lawyers, auditors, traffic wardens, etc.) are not all of perfect quality. Think of an audio amplifier design, it looks wonderful on paper and works perfectly in the simulator. But fails spectacularly when built of real world components because each component is not quite exactly as specified. A sensitivity analysis can discover this by, for example, running the simulation multiple times with each component varied according to its expected quality (say +/- 10% for resistors, +/- 30 percent for transistor gain, etc.)

>government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words

The only solution is mostly forbid government regulation except for critical things, of which "sale of cabbage" and ten of thousands others now currently regulated are not.

In order to do that within a Democracy, you have to dispel the unconscious notion (that a lot of modern voters have), that the government is a father/mother figure that has unlimited resources, can't make mistakes, and its operated by saints with the "common good" in mind 24/7.

Maybe force the lawmakers to include a text explaining the "spirit" of the law, also including indicators to the law effectiveness. For example, a law is implemented to bring down then "car accidents per million" indicator. If one year later car accidents are the same or more then the law is scrapped.

What you propose of robo-lawyers and law as code sounds as the script for a futuristic Kafka's "The Process" as an episode of Black Mirror.

This made my day! Wish you all the best and hope that this will materialize. Who needs skyscrapers and stuff (Marc is writing about) if you can have computational law?! In the meantime I will try to escape the country that will adopt such techniques the last: ol Germany

Sure, but is immutability more important in law or in code? Updating a smart contract seems to be as tedious as changing a law.

Yes

“Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great.”

I’m not sure it is always great.

Studies show racism[1] and hunger[2] and can impact sentencing judgments.

> When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

How is that different than software?

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language :)

Law should be objectively decidable. Thousands upon thousands of pages of enigmatic legalistic nonsense make it impossible to predict a legal decision. When there is this much law, it becomes a paradox where the result is actually lawless - it becomes the whim of a judge's interpretation.

I’m a big fan of anything that will bring effective legal access to everyone. Technology will definitely play a role, but so will legal deregulation. Lots of jurisdictions are experimenting with opening up certain areas of legal practice to people who aren’t lawyers. And they’re rebuilding systems (alongside technology) to make them easier to access without attorneys.

The troubling part is that at some point, we need to tackle electoral reform. Even if we tackle the legal system and provide effective legal access to everyone, we’ll still be a long ways from tackling mass disillusionment. Hell, in lots of cases, disillusionment and/or disenfranchisement are logical results of history!

Anyways, good comment!

A piece of this is to eliminate the friction of legal text by open sourcing legal templates, in a graph, on GitHub. The key word here is "source." Legal documents currently are blobs, not source. See github.com/CommonAccord/ Lots of exampless, including the YC SAFES, Series Seed, GA4GH data sharing, etc. It's not full algorithmic, but compatible with algorithmic approaches, like Mike Genesereth's and Meng's.

It seems donotpay can get you into a legal engagement easily, but the other party can tie you up in more legal battles that donotpay doesn't yet handle and then you are screwed if you can't hire and pay expensive lawyers.

This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can't mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless the information was never before recorded in an online electronic system. Given that I have never seen a functioning typewriter in a corporate office, I imagine that would smooth things a bit.

Also, just as a matter of how the US legal system works, the presumption is that someone is innocent until challenged, whether by the state or by a private party. A prospective business could not file a petition with a court asking if their conduct was legal or not, since it's not really a controversy. But businesses will always do loads of due diligence with lawyers beforehand, who should help identify areas of legal risk.

Read "Why Courts Don't Work" by Richard Neeley, who used to be chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court. Courts don't work because a lot of people don't want them to work. If you could get a judgement in a week in a minor labor case, employers would have to obey labor law, for example.

See also https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Matters-Rescuing-system-twent...

> We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner

Is it being lazy or rather having tons of work that needs to be done too?

This is exactly how two of the biggest startups of the past 15 years - Airbnb and Uber - were built.

Airbnb and Uber built products that were in a legal gray area. Lawmakers are still catching up to them.

Key to their strategy was having deep enough pockets to fight many simultaneous legal and PR battles.

Which is enabled by VC funding, which IMO makes them complicit on a systemic level. It's arguable whether you can blame a particular investor for Uber's thoroughly rotten and antisocial business model - but once you see more of such startups getting funded left and right, it's fair to ask the question, "why such business model is even a possible option".

I don't agree that Uber's business model is fundamentally "rotten and antisocial". Short range point to point transport (cabs) was awful before Uber and Lyft. The rides are easier to get, the drivers are less likely to screw you over, and you know in advance just how much things will cost.

I'm glad they took on a legal gray area because cabs had completely used regulatory capture to get away with being a terrible service to the public.

I'm talking about the "it's better to force forgiveness than ask for permission" part, and they weren't in grey area - in a lot of places, they were doing plainly illegal business. I'm talking about their business model of "let's do illegal business and use deep pockets to keep regulators at bay, until we get enough public support to make ourselves invulnerable". Also known as totally unfair competition. I'm also talking about insurance and worker rights shenanigans, and a host of other sociopathic behaviors their management exhibited (all reported on in detail over the past years).

On top of that, cabs were awful in some cities in some places around the world. They worked well enough in others. Over here (Kraków area, Poland), we had private point-to-point transport companies that managed to change the law through a proper court process, like civilized people do.

>rotten and antisocial business model

What's rotten and antisocial about providing cheap, reliable transportation ?

It's about how it's being provided. The history of Uber's sociopathic and often outright illegal behavior is long and well-documented.

Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted, regardless of legality. Very few lawmakers want to aggressively go against public sentiment just because the law says they should.

> Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted

The people who want the service are not necessarily the same as the people who are affected by the externalities of the service.

Everyone loves having AirBnb available to expand selection in NYC when they visit, but how many New Yorkers who aren’t AirBnb hosts love having tons of short term rentals in their building?

I agree that people didn't really understand what they were getting into fully when they initially agitated for it, but it's definitely the case that there was broad initial public support which is what allowed the companies to get a foothold.

Seems like a good approach to me. Imagine if they waited and we were still stuck with taxis.

Technology innovation: "Can it be done?"

Market innovation: "Should it be done?"

Regulatory innovation: "May it be done?"

I also don't think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.

This is an American doctrine, that there must be an "actual case or controversy" - Canadian courts can and do issue advisory opinions to interpret regulation.

Which are still usually advisory and not legally binding advice.

I would hope they go a long way towards reducing your responsibility if you follow one and then run into a legal problem because of it.

Pre-enforcement lawsuits do exist to answer questions for parties prior to taking actions that would result in liability. One was just recently decided in favor of the ACLU.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/13055544225/dc-co...

Not a court, but government agencies can and do issue "guidance" documents after receiving feedback. For example, the EPA guidance on Class VI (CO2) injection wells [1] and IRS guidance on 45Q CO2 capture and storage credits [2]

[1] https://www.epa.gov/uic/class-vi-guidance-documents

[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-provides-answers-and-a-safe....

is that what suing for "declaratory relief" is, or is that only for civil law?

Problem is, the faster courts are, the more likely people are to actually wait for them, which ends up a net slowdown. Really the only path to success is, take a risk to try to beat the competition and hope the courts side with you in the end. And if you're successful, they probably will.

Build more courts until they can deal with the volume, or fix so your laws so that less people need to go to court

IMO this is a classic case of loss aversion. Enforcers of law are put in a position to make subjective decisions that impact them personally. They don’t want to make a decision. They want someone else to make a decision. Decision stew until they can be disassociated with any person or group. This takes time. Usually the decision is tempered to absolve all parties and thus be convoluted and misinterpreted. Rinse and repeat.