Maybe it’s naive, but I’ve often thought law itself should be spelled out in code. Obviously some things are human judgement. But take those as inputs into an unbiased machine that outputs fair sentencing, procurement etc. Still let meatbags review it at least for the time being. It could be a guidance system for judges and juries at least at first. Seems like it could help clear cases quicker and provide fairness.
Yes, it is naive. All code has bugs. Some time ago some people though it would be good idea to encode contractual agreements with code. I guess it should be no sutprise that someone found a bug in the contract and got him/herself most of the money that was tied into the contract framework. If I recall correctly, we are talking about tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of involuntary bug bounty in this particular case (google DAO hack of you have not heard)
Further, in my opinion there does not seem to be any solid logic what me and other humans think that is right or wrong, which makes it quite difficult to spell out preferred laws into code. (If someone disagrees, I am happy to hear one counterexample of moral axiom that holds always, without any exceptions whatsoever, realistic or unrealistic. Even for one single person)
Loopholes are essentially bugs, and they're common. Is there a reason to believe another way of encoding laws would necessarily be more bug-prone than it currently is?
Yes. Which means that Ethereum guys quite quickly after DAO hack started to think that "code as law" is actually a really stupid idea. What is beyond my understanding is how anyone believes into the smart contracts using Ethereum after that, though.
Law as code solves a problem nobody has: application of unambiguous law to unambiguous facts. Even the simplest cases involve law that is unambiguous by design: what is a “unreasonable” search for fourth amendment purposes? All cases involve ambiguous facts. Was the eye witness in a position to see the murder? Is a witness lying? Every criminal charge and many civil claims involve an intent element. What was the defendant’s intent? Litigation is almost entirely concerned with these things, and codifying law addresses none of it.
It’s like applying code to coding. Yeah you can have IDEs that generate skeleton classes. Does that actually solve a problem anyone has, or create a real productivity boost compared to just using Emacs?
Great comment. Here's a good page from CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics[1].
> "One technical problem with Computational Law, familiar to many individual with legal training, is due to the open texture of laws. Consider a municipal regulation stating "No vehicles in the park". On first blush this is fine, but it is really quite problematic. Just what constitutes a vehicle? Is a bicycle a vehicle? What about a skateboard? How about roller skates? What about a baby stroller? A horse? A repair vehicle? For that matter, what is the park? At what altitude does it end? If a helicopter hovers at 10 feet, is that a violation? What if it flies over at 100 feet?
> The resolution of this problem is to limit the application of Computational Law to those cases where such issues can be externalized or marginalized. We allow human users to make judgments about such open texture concepts in entering data or we avoid regulatory applications where such concepts abound.
> A different sort of challenge to Computational Law stems from the fact that not all legal reasoning is deductive. Edwina Rissland [Rissland et al.] notes that, "Law is not a matter of simply applying rules to facts via modus ponens"; and, when regarding the broad application of AI techniques to law, this is certainly true. The rules that apply to a real-world situation, as well as even the facts themselves, may be open to interpretation, and many legal decisions are made through case-based reasoning, bypassing explicit reasoning about laws and statutes. The general problem of open texture when interpreting rules, along with the parallel problem of running out of rules to apply when resolving terms, presents significant obstacles to implementable automated rule-based reasoning."
While I generally agree, yes ide with reasonable code generation is better then just using Emacs, unless you packed emacs with so many plugins that you turned it into yet another ide.
I dont know if law can be reduced to code, and it should ideally be intelligible and accessible to the average person, it seems?
Reminds me of this video, where a physicist argues math is not the language of the universe because it cannot convey meaning about many human concepts.(1)
Anyways, it's not like most people, or even apparently police officers, understand even basics about the law right now, anyways.(2)
Take a relatively grey-filled topic like: One person has caused the death of another.
Now show me the simple law covering that?
People claiming "the law can be simple" are exactly the same as luddites who claim "why cant you just make computers work?!" - each side has no appreciation of the inherent complexities involved.
> Take a relatively grey-filled topic like: One person has caused the death of another. Now show me the simple law covering that?
How is that "grey-filled"? There's murder and there's negligence, basically reflecting direct vs. indirect role in causing the death. Both scenarios consider intent to gauge the severity. So you have two knobs you can turn, but which cover the entirety of human-caused deaths.
This is not a "grey-filled" scenario in the least. In fact, it's probably one of the most accessible and clear-cut cases of the law being reducible to simple rules.
What's often not simple is fulfilling the standards of evidence required to know which rules to apply, ie. how much evidence is needed to establish mens rea? But that's not what you claimed. You claimed that you can't have simple, intelligible rules that cover many shades of grey.
And self-defense? or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)?
So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim? Or accidental sports injury?
You are attempting to simplify the world to simple morality tales. Hope you never have to live in such a world.
Good point, being under threat is a third knob. Still very simple.
> or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)?
Again, car "accidents" are always due to negligence somewhere, either mechanical failures making the manufacturer liable, or distraction on the part of a driver, or inebriation, etc. These are all very simple considerations that everyone understands.
> So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim?
Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that. If your "car accident victim" had intent to cause harm with his vehicle, that's murder too.
>Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that
So in the space of a minimal online discussion you've gone from 2 classes of murder to now 5 classes (3 degrees of murder + negligence + under threat).
Now continue this exercise for the next 250 years and you will eventually have a codification of the classes of murder which roughly mirrors our current laws. Which is to say, it will get progressively more complex.
No, you're not paying attention. There are 3 independent variables, negligence, intent and threat, and the various permutations of these are what define the classes of murder, criminal negligence, and so on.
3 independent variables is not a complex model. The complexity of the law that people bemoan are not about simple issues like murder, they are issues like zoning laws, tax law, and the numerous byzantine exceptions that are carved out to serve special interests, or laws that are archaic and have never been revisited or are only selectively applied.
How many different sub-variations of "intent" are there?
So if I plan to kill Person A, but miss my shot and kill Person B whats the charge? What if I was under threat by Person A? Who should even be charged for Person B's death...me or Person A?
Moreover, you've neglected to mention that there are all sorts of "human killing another" which are not even considered a crime (abortion, do not resuscitate orders, etc).
>The complexity of the law that people bemoan are not about simple issues like murder, they are issues like zoning laws, tax law
Lets not get ahead of ourselves, we still have barely scratched the surface with the 'easy laws'
> Maybe it’s naive, but I’ve often thought law itself should be spelled out in code
Any formal system can either be consistent or complete - not both. Therefore, you will always need an oversight to check for most individual legal cases.
Your therefore doesn't follow. You haven't established that the law would even need to form a "complete" logic, which means it must be able to encode both addition and multiplication. There is little reason to think this is the case.
Furthermore, oversight wouldn't necessarily yield any further insight even if it were. Humans aren't extra-logical, we have similar limitations.
> You haven't established that the law would even need to form a "complete" logic, which means it must be able to encode both addition and multiplication. There is little reason to think this is the case.
The very basics of a legal system are consistency (fairness) and completeness (coverage). Are you making an argument against these two basics?
Please don't quote the incompleteness theorem without knowing it's precise statement. Far too many people do this to make absurd claims.
In particular, the tradeoff between soundness and completeness only holds for those mathematical systems which can internally encode peano arithmetic (naturals, addition, multiplication, first order logic)
Therefore, to invoke the incompleteness theorem, you need to prove that a legal system is powerful enough to encode arithmetic, which to me at least is not obvious.
There are many systems that are both consistent and complete, but are just not as expressive.
>The very basics of a legal system are consistency (fairness) and completeness (coverage).
You are using words that have a very precise formal meaning into a completely different (informal) sense. Probably this is the source of your confusion.
