Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, police and others involved in the whole process.
For your example of "child": how often does it actually cause a problem in practice? How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means.
How many improperly punished people is good enough? How many cases go to Supreme Court because the amount of needless ambiguity just adds up, one word at a time?
> This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means.
Right? Why do many laws redefine it?
And no, cases don't often make it to the Supreme Court because the wording of the law is ambiguous. They make it to the SC because the parties disagree on legal principles and on whether laws are unconstituional or not.
> Right? Why do many laws redefine it?
I would have to see some specific examples to judge for myself. Still, this seems to be the opposite problem compared to what was raised earlier. So which is it? Do we want laws to be more explicit about their exact definitions of words, or more implicit?
I'm not from your legal system, and yet even I know that's not right: they make it the SC because the 'losing' party disagrees with a lower judge's decision that's already been made, and makes an argument compelling enough in appealing it that it needs to be reconsidered. (A few times, to get as far as the SC, probably.) That almost has to be because of some 'ambiguity' - the lower judge decided one way and the appeal is 'well no I don't think that's the correct reading'.
But cases that go to the Supreme Court of the United States are often cases where the "ambiguity" is on how the US constitution should be interpreted and applied.
In a practical sense you're not going to be able to codify the US constitution into code. It's even a well received "feature" that constitutions are sometimes a bit ambiguous, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution
Also, appeals essentially mean that at least one of the parties believes that a judge made a mistake in the way they applied the law, not necessarily that the law itself is ambiguous. A judge can fail to apply a perfectly unambiguous law, or at least a plaintiff can believe that they did, and can bring enough evidence that their belief has some merit.
I don’t see how those are exclusionary principles. Also, I have never heard about this case, but after some simple googling I learned that the Supreme Court indeed had to figure out the definition for children in a particular law: https://berkeleysolicitors.ie/supreme-court-determines-defin...
> Still, this seems to be the opposite problem compared to what was raised earlier.
No, it is the same problem I mentioned before: some laws define it in a contradictory way; some laws don’t define it. I told you it’s a fun exercise!
> Do we want laws to be more explicit about their exact definitions of words, or more implicit?
I want laws to make sense. Inconsistency doesn’t make sense and only brings troubles. Vagueness is good. Ambiguity is bad.
This is the real advantage of codifying law into a programming language. You can have validation and assertion that is automated. And a strict structure, free from ambiguity.
As an additional advantage, multilingualism becomes more accessible, with the codified program/definition acting as the lingua franca of law. Thus, someone who only knows English could make sense of Japanese laws by reading it.
The text of the law is meant to be understood by the people that it applies to, i.e. everyone living in the locality which passed said law. Expressing law in a formal language goes directly against that goal. Imagine if a EULA you get presented with, instead of being a wall of repetitive text, would be a wall of code with symbols you at best remember from some class you took in 8th grade.
For one, it'd make them a lot shorter. You could use inheritance or composition to refactor out repetitive boilerplate, which is 90% of what EULAs are. The thing you see would only be the places where it deviates from a base EULA that you could study once.
For another, it would catch bugs automatically. I have caught bugs in contracts drafted by lawyers a bunch of times, just by reading them carefully. For example numbers that are stated in both words and digits but they don't match. References to clauses that no longer exist. Statements that are contradictory.
A properly written language could be compiled to English for people who for some reason can't read the "real" language. But a well written PL for law would be quite readable.
All of the rest of what you mention could be achieved with plain language contracts exactly as well. Nothing prevents the software industry from getting together and producing a base EULA that all others refer.
Except of course for the fact that it would be utterly impossible to convince companies to agree to such an endeavor, whether in code or plain language or any other way. Especially since the purpose of EULAs is not to be clear, but to confuse end users with verbiage.
And I have heard lawyers explain that sometimes ambiguity, in contracts at least, is a good thing as it reduces the amount of a priori negotiation for low probability events. The the low probability event happens and the contract is ambiguous then you negotiate at that time and maybe sue.
And for laws, I think a bit of flex in the system probably would be a good thing. Give some scope for local judgment an autonomy to the people closest to the situation.
Common law has like 800 years of tech debt. It's turtles all the way down. And by turtles I mean precedent, and not all of them are compatible.
None of what I've described is malicious. It's just what happens when law meets the messiness of the real world.
Which is why it is the common standard in German law to define every possibly unclear term either in the relevant section of the law itself or in an introduction article.
The latter is better than the former, but it also makes it even harder to interpret sections with no definition.
I don't see how a language is going to solve this. This isn't really an issue of language, it's an issue with ambiguity in the very intent itself. That's why we have judges, who interpret that intent.
Relying on ambiguity is admitting there are no laws, and we rely on the common sense of the people in thr judicial system.
What's better:
- relying on the common sense of the people in the judicial system to interpret the intent of the law as it applies to a particular situation,
- or relying on the common sense of legislators to write a precise, unambiguous law that will cover all possible situations without negative unintended consequences, and without the law-writing process being influenced by spureous interests and pressures?
The answer highlight why the law is interpreted as is now, with a body of trained public servants analyzing the particulars of each situation, rather than by fanatics trying to follow the letter of the law.
Languages like this may help clarify the intent of legislators so that it is not twisted by clever lawyers; but a human reviewer should always check the relevance of one law to any particular case, and wether the text corresponds to the original intent as applied to a given situation.
Judges and juries and lawyers all exist to help us interpret the inexact legal code in a way that is (hopefully usually; but obviously not always) fair and reasonable given the often-nuanced situations at hand.
Law is political. It's persuasive, not deterministic. It often comes down to a judgment based on the relative political power of the entities in question.
Even if you find a statute that says very clearly that X is unlawful, there will be situations where a lawyer will argue that it isn't.
Sometimes they'll make that case successfully - for various possible reasons, not all of which will be lawful themselves.
This is one reason why statute law is expanded by case law. And good luck trying to automate case law.
Being a mess riddled with inconsistencies is not a feature.
As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.