Most people today don't write code for safety critical systems. The abstract mentions they already uncovered a "bug" in an active law by rewriting it in their language, so it could be an immensely helpful tool for finding edge cases and loopholes in that mess.
> It's already the case in many countries today that there is too much focus on the wording of the law and not enough on the intent
Again, as the abstract mentions this is intended for laws that are meant to be interpreted 100% literally like an algorithm. Those exist and those are also exactly the ones that should be absolutely consistent.
The real problem I see is that clear, loophole-free laws are often not in the interest of the lawmakers. You only need to take a look at the underhanded ways various parties are trying to undermine privacy.
The fact that a law is internally consistent and free of loopholes does not necessarily mean that it is a good law but an algorithmic approach to creating such laws risks making their creation too easy so that we end up with a large body of law that can't be argued against because it has been 'proven' correct.
I'm reminded of a remark that Donald Knuth made regarding a piece of code. It went something like this: "Be careful if you use this, I have merely proven it correct but not tried to run it."
> Most people today don't write code for safety critical systems. The abstract mentions they already uncovered a "bug" in an active law by rewriting it in their language, so it could be an immensely helpful tool for finding edge cases and loopholes in that mess.
I'll give you an example from a field that I (unfortunately) have a reasonable amount of experience of where the law and contracts are supposed to be interpreted 100% literally like an algorithm: structured finance (eg the subject matter of the 2008 financial crisis). The prospectus of a structured security like a mortgage bond is typically a hundred or more pages of very dense legalese that was worked on intensively by highly-specialised lawyers and bankers for months. Its intent is to set up a small special-purpose company with strict rules on how it operates down to the last penny and zero discretion. This allows investors (in theory) to understand how the bond will perform.
The opening chapter of my introductory textbook on structured credit analysis says the author (who has been part of those teams for years and has worked on hundreds or possibly thousands of bonds) has never read a bond prospectus for a structured security that does not contain serious drafting errors. I personally worked on a bond for months and read, edited and commented on the bond model and prospectus hundreds of times. We certainly were trying to make our prospectus as simple, clear and loophole-free as possible. Then a few years after it launched we discovered we had made a big mistake in drafting it that had gone unnoticed by me, the expert bankers and lawyers and all the investors so far. Luckily we were able to fix the problem without negative consequences. There is literally no chance that this error would have been found or solved by a formal system and if anything it would actually have been worse.
Some things are complex enough that they are just very hard to do. The existing system allows for that by having a rigorous process of dispute, interpretation and argument to decide complex questions post facto.
There is no chance that a formal system wouldn't have revealed this bug? Static analysis and simulations wouldn't have helped?
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Engineers have the ability to automate some very complex issues. But there will always be a class of issues beyond automation, simulation, analysis, etc. and we just have to accept that the only way to solve them is with slow, hard, error-prone work.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't know how decentralization would change anything other than adding safeties against manipulation if done right.
> After close inspection of the OpenFisca code, a discrepancy was located with the Catala implementation. Indeed, according to article L755-12 of the Social Security Code, the income cap for the family benefits does not apply in overseas territories with single-child families. This subtlety was not taken into account by OpenFisca, and was fixed after its disclosure by the authors.
Here's the pull request for their fix to the benefits simulator: https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france/issues/1426
It's a fancy new thing that will be branded as helping to avoid mistakes, reduce legal system costs, increase consistency, etc.
So, it will be applied to existing laws more generally than the abstract suggests it should be.
New laws will be made with this in mind, increasing application regardless of whether the new laws are actually literally interpretable.
It will become entrenched and hard to remove as allocated funds to pay people to do the same jobs disappear.
> it would be better [to adopt a law system] which maximizes the human interpretive element rather than attempts to remove it.
> twist the law in any direction which benefits them, even in ways that don't feel right.
The first statement seems to say that the more humans can interpret the law the better, the second statement seems to imply that people actually doing such interpretation with the tools available now is a bad thing.
It's a good thing your comment is not a legal text though. Otherwise some formalism would be quite welcome to derive the intended meaning.
If you follow the exact wording of the law, it's easier to find loopholes (like a hacker looking for a breach).
If you follow the intent of the law, then it's much harder. A judge will see if you acted in bad faith, if your actions are against the spirit of the law.
It's the fact that people have accepted the primacy of the written word that they allow themselves to be swayed to accept verdicts which don't make sense. It's important to factor in the fact that criminal justice involves multiple jurors, so you don't want some outdated wording written in the 1900s to allow one bad juror to use wording of a law or precedent to convince other jurors of a conclusion which best matches the wording but defies common sense.
It's like in the US constitution, there is this paragraph:
”No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts"
And yet today the US government (which is clearly an alliance of states) pays back its debts by printing more money not backed by gold. People have used the wording "No state" to imply that the Federal government is not a state and therefore, it doesn't apply. But clearly this defies common sense about the intent of the law which was to prevent the government from printing unlimited money not tethered to any scarce asset to inflate away its true debt... And yet this is exactly what the federal government (the alliance of states) is doing nowadays.
That's not correct: The "alliance of states" was under the (superseded) Articles of Confederation — the governance failures of which led to the 1787 constitutional convention. In contrast, the very first words of the Constitution state explicitly that "We, the People of the United States" [emphasis added] were joining together to establish a national polity that transcended the states.
> People have used the wording "No state" to imply that the Federal government is not a state
It's far, far more than just a mere implication — it's a foundational assumption. See, for example, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. [0]
Your fact " I read that many criminals in the US get away with crimes because of failures of procedure by the prosecution for example;"
which you interpret as
"this is a clear sign that there is too much focus on the wording of the law. "
could also be interpreted as:
police often use illegal means to target people and fabricate evidence, and the US's well-functioning legal system stops this.
in a document delineating what qualifies as states and what qualifies as the federal government with all sorts of text about relations between the two it would seem to be a really reasonable implication to make.
Furthermore your example is in a paragraph that starts "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation", by your logic it follows that the Federal Government cannot ever enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation because the Federal Government is after all a State.
If those definitions were tacked on afterwards, then it would exemplify exactly the kinds of distortions I'm referring to. I don't know the order in which the US constitution was written but that definitely should affect the intent.
>> Furthermore your example is in a paragraph that starts "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation"
TBH, I didn't even see this interpretation. I guess some people are focused on the wording to an entirely different level. I used the semicolons to interpret it as "no alliance pertaining to the payment of debt" based on my interpretation, it doesn't say anything about alliances pertaining to other matters.
But this seems to reinforce my point. The words can be ambiguous but it doesn't mean we should disqualify the intent altogether.
The reason for the writing of the Constitution was the Articles of Confederation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation being rather problematic for running a nation.
In fact for any judge familiar with the Articles of Confederation and the history thereof, which I would hope was every judge, the interpretation of the paragraph you cite would be completely obvious and pertaining only to the states, because some of the original problems between the states that caused the Constitution to be written was states doing such things as entering into treaties with foreign nations, coining their own money (making trade between states more difficult than needed), etc. etc.
Basically the paragraph is saying "all the stuff you guys were doing or maybe thinking about doing, stops now!" - I say "maybe thinking about doing" because unsure about letters of Marque although I could certainly see it having been done by some of the more haughty states at the time - say New York or Virginia.
One person's "technicality" is another person's last hope to have a core principle enforced like "innocent until proven guilty".
Intent is a squishy thing that's open to endless subjectivity and biases. Intent should only be used when the letter of the law isn't sufficiently clear.
Separation of Powers was one of the most brilliant concepts undergirding the US Constitution. It's already been damaged pretty badly over the years. We don't need to double down on that damage by insisting upon having judges ignore the wording of laws so they can go with their feelings regarding intent.
Upthread there was a discussion of hundreds of pages going into something as trivially straightforward as the requirements of a financial contract. For something involving human behavior, there will always be billions of corner cases, exceptions, confounding events, and other factors leaving decisions open to a judgment call.
That's why lawyers spend years just learning to read the law, and then reading and synthesizing thousands of decisions that try to patch together all those inconsistencies and gaps. And even then, every case ultimately comes down to a judge's judgment call on which lawyer has done so more successfully... or worse, a jury of twelve people deliberately selected for their ignorance of the law.
Human beings are too squishy to write genuinely precise laws. Lawyers try to pretend otherwise, and that pretension is fundamental to trying to actually have a society. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that any law is actually rigorous in a sense that a computer programmer, scientist, or logician would recognize.
At this point, I want to point out that while a lot of discussion always surrounds the status and the individual rights of the states, I think it really is clear that the US is the state (as in nation) and the individual states, while they have some autonomy, are the inseparable parts that the US is made of, just like in other federal states (nations).
From that perspective, I think the justification for the paragraph you mention is clear: The states are not independent, and therefore they can't have diplomatic ties with other nations. In diplomacy, this has always been the case: Diplomatic ties always exist between independent nations, never between an independent nation and a federal, dependent state. There is nothing like an "Embassy of the U.S. State of Texas to the United Mexican States" since the State of Texas can't have diplomatic ties on its own.
What you mention regarding printing more money does not apply here: The paragraph you mention talks about the US states, but not about the (nation) state itself, the USA. There exists no alliance of states, rather there is a federal republic consisting of states (which in turn are not allowed to have any diplomatic ties of their own). The (nation) state represented by the US government is obviously not a (federal) state inside the US, that would be absurd.
That is a really, really strained interpretation of this clause. Because these exact words are used to give these powers to other entities in government:
Article I, Section 8, clause 5: [The Congress shall have Power] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
Article I, Section 8, clause 11: [The Congress shall have Power] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Article II, Section 1, clause 2: [The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur
Some of the other things forbidden with "No State" are also expressly forbidden to Congress itself. How is it common sense that "No state" also includes "the federal government" when the federal government is sometimes given the power which is allotted to "no state" and sometimes expressly forbidden as well that which is allotted to "no state"?
How does anyone know they got away with a crime if their cases never went to trial? Isn't that exactly what a trial is there to establish.
The USA has a long history of village folk "just knowing" that an accused is guilty. Seldom worked out well.
Pilots have procedures they must follow. So do cops. They just need to do their jobs properly.
Based on probability, you can safely assume that some percentage of them were guilty. That is more correct than assuming that they were all innocent. But to presume innocence simply on the basis that they were not convicted is itself part of the problem wereby the procedure and the wording takes precedence over the intent.
In reality, there is no certainty; some guilty people will be acquitted and some innocent people will be charged. To put too much weight on the words 'guilty' or 'innocent' is to ignore this reality.
Unless the intent is "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer."
The intent of US law is specifically to allow many guilty people to be freed due to procedural errors, and so the fact that this happens is not taking "precedence over the intent".
Also, in the US, no one is ever found "innocent" in court. They are found either guilty or not guilty.
Yeah, we crossed that Rubicon like Evil Kenevil jumped the Grand Canyon a long time ago.
I'd like to see this sort of rigor applied to the tax code so that we can all agree that "complexity is a subsidy" and just scuttle the whole mess in favor of something not an iron rod of oppression.
Seek death penalty? Abort, Retry, Fail?_
A friend recently told me "I never needed a lawyer because someone did not understand a contract, but several times because someone tried to finagle with legal sophistry".
When trying to compare the legal systems of various countries, it is instructive to note that they differ by large amounts. The basics of Law, and the governing principles and assumptions behind Law, vary quite a lot. Even within countries, the law is often not the same everywhere. Wikipedia has a good map of the 'basic' law systems used throughout the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems
Writing code is not a single activity, it is a modern means of communication and information transmission. Code is written for a vast range of purposes, some better suited to less rigorous programmers than others. No-one is asking or expecting the authors of bad code that you have in mind to formalize legal systems. The latter task will be on the rigorous side of programming, presumably leaning heavily on static type checking / automated theorem proving.
It's already the case in many countries today that there is too much focus on the wording of the law and not enough on the intent. People try to use a rigid fixation on the importance of words to twist the law in any direction which benefits them, even in ways that don't feel right.
We risk a Kafkaesque situation.