[HN Gopher] Legalese - Computational Law
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Legalese - Computational Law
Author : sdeframond
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-05-17 20:36 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (legalese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (legalese.com)
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Sort of weird to have their whole one pager as an image
| considering that there is no alt text so its not really
| accessible if you are blind.
| [deleted]
| nemo1618 wrote:
| I would love to see this succeed, if only so that their static
| analyzer can go around detecting vulnerabilities ("loopholes") in
| all sorts of common laws. Legal 0-days!
| grenoire wrote:
| I had a discussion with my boss not long ago, he's a tax lawyer
| with a few decades under his belt. I asked him simply if he
| thinks he'll keep his job for more decades to come. His answer
| was quite enlightening, mainly because of how concrete it was:
| The problem with _tax law_ (which is not the only set of laws,
| and not contract law either, but perhaps automatable
| nevertheless) is that it 's simply come to the point that it is
| at right now as a cumulative effort of centuries of work. It
| works additively and builds structures so complex that the title
| tax lawyer almost becomes meaningless with so many specialties
| being required; VAT, corporate and personal income taxes,
| inheritance and property... Any effort to algorithmically
| digitise the existing law would fail unless it's able to
| perfectly replicate it in code. All of the loopholes and
| exceptions, safeguards and declarations, there's immense inertia
| ahead.
|
| What he on the other hand thinks has been revolutionary is free
| access to law, advanced text search tools, and software to make
| filings and communication significantly easier. That's the boring
| part that speeds your work up so you can spend more time devising
| plans to get your clients to pay less in taxes, and construct
| stronger defences.
|
| There are many low-hanging fruits in this process; I wish these
| guys the best of luck, but it seems to me that the comparisons
| drawn (Intuit, Adobe, etc.) are not analogues. Lawyers aren't
| _seeking_ these tools for it doesn 't provide them value, it only
| takes away billable hours away.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It seems like there could be a lot of value in disentangling
| the web: repealing the original laws and replacing them with a
| single law that covers everything in one place. Legal
| refactoring if you like.
|
| I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And
| presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder
| still.
|
| It would be quite interesting to think about what the legal
| equivalent of unit tests would look like. Presumably a large
| collections of sets of circumstances and desired legal
| outcomes. It seems to me that this might be an interesting
| output of legislatures in addition to statutes (although
| whether they would/should be controlled by the legisalture or
| judiciary is also quite an interesting question, as our
| existing system seems to rely quite heavily on the judiciary
| being able reinterpret laws in ways the original legislators
| most likely didn't intend)
| cbsmith wrote:
| The idea that simpler laws won't get exploited is... Well, I
| get it, because that's how one operates in computer security,
| but the way the law works is necessarily quite different.
| It's not designed so much to make doing what is illegal
| impossible as it is to make it possible to prosecute those
| doing things that we'd like to discourage.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| > _repealing the original laws and replacing them with a
| single law that covers everything in one place. Legal
| refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a
| humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law
| makes it much harder still._
|
| These are called Reform Acts. They are indeed humungous
| tasks, rarely undertaken. Where I studied law, in the
| Northern Territory, a _Law of Property Act_ was passed in
| 2000 and repealed Acts and overruled case law going back to
| the 12th century in Britain. It was indeed a massive effort.
|
| For some areas of law the Act is also a Code (the Act
| explicitly says that it is the sole, whole body of the
| relevant law). This is mostly done for criminal law.
|
| Codes are rare in common law jurisdictions like the US, UK,
| Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. Codes are much more
| common in civil law countries like France, where the ideal is
| for all of law to be centralised and rationalised. Both
| systems require endless tinkering, debate and
| reinterpretation, which is why I am skeptical of universalist
| missions to convert the whole of the law into a system of
| formal symbols.
| grenoire wrote:
| There have been attempts by the French and Dutch governments
| to codify parts of tax law as a trial of sorts, check out M
| for one https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
|
| Nevertheless, such efforts cover minimal portions already
| very clearly defined and debated. As another commenter
| replied, reforms are rarely undertaken for various reasons.
| One great issue with tax law is also that whatever code you
| may write is not necessarily guaranteed to be 'better'
| (fairness, revenue collected, lack of loopholes and edge
| cases, completeness, correctness... pick your metric) simply
| because it's _code_. That 's what I thought too; but no
| longer.
| munk-a wrote:
| > Lawyers aren't seeking these tools for it doesn't provide
| them value, it only takes away billable hours away.
|
| All billable hours aren't created equally. If I can automate
| the work that I currently hire fresh grads to do - the work of
| actually drafting up contract agreements for review and wills -
| but price my services just under the prices offered by other
| firms then I can make a killing.
|
| You can purchase a hand carved wooden table for your living
| room and some people still actively manufacture these "bespoke"
| items, however most folks shop at IKEA and chose between one of
| a dozen styles available for a dining room table. These two
| products are mostly functionally identical in terms of
| supporting food and weathering the years (if you go by
| depreciation the IKEA table probably loses value slower than a
| hand carved table - and you can replace it pretty much at
| will). There will likely always be contract lawyers around to
| sort out large M&A agreements and other high priced
| transactions, but wills and simple employment contracts -
| delivering these in a correct format (i.e. not just a download
| a sample contract and fill in names possibly resulting in
| something unenforceable) will be a game changer.
|
| Taxes are extremely complicated - but they got that way by
| design. The US Tax code is the result of one of the most insane
| applications of regulatory capture in the world and it's there
| to allow Intuit to continue printing money at the expense of
| the tax payer - simplifying those (like for real - not the 2017
| version) might not end up happening for decades as there is a
| ton of money entrenched - so that seems like an incredibly poor
| part of the market to initially target.
|
| Contract law though, it's not simple but it's so utterly clear
| and actually codifying it would likely greatly aide law makers
| in discovering and resolving any existing loopholes and might
| even provide some useful insight into how the US could better
| handle the question of employee vs. contractor by enumerating
| rights and privileges in a clearer format.
|
| And wills, pretty much everyone seeks independent legal council
| to write one of these at some point - it is highly advisable
| depending on where you live (in Canada a lack of a clear will
| causes assets to be tied up by the government for an extended
| period of time) so you could make a lot of money edging the
| market out there in particular.
| [deleted]
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Isn't this the problem "smart contracts" were supposed to solve?
| I say "supposed to," because the problem here is that if
| contracts are code, and code can have bugs, then contracts can
| have bugs. Technically, this is true of traditional contracts,
| but, if a traditional contract has a bug, it gets settled through
| the court system, not just executed as is.
| Zhyl wrote:
| It's worth noting that 'Smart Contracts' are more 'Financial
| Instruments as code' rather than 'Ricardian Contracts' which
| are what most people think when they see 'smart' and 'contract'
| together.
|
| I had a comment on the last time this came up where 'A computer
| language for law' was a bad idea unqualified, but this page
| actually seems to address most of the points I raised in that
| comment.
|
| The thrust of the comment is 'Law is not something that will be
| executable and that we just automate' but more 'Law is
| something with an underlying structure that we can use
| engineering tools to write, validate and understand.' That is
| to say, the tools are there to help the humans with doing law
| stuff, not doing it for them.
|
| This page is pretty wooly and high level, but it does seem to
| be going more down that avenue, which is laudable. It does
| mention smart contracts and Ethereum which I think might be
| distracting in the early days, but we'll see.
| sharps_xp wrote:
| I think you should rethink the name.
|
| Here's the definition: the formal and technical language of legal
| documents that is often hard to understand. "the typed pages were
| full of confusing legalese"
|
| Business people actually think it's an asset to have an attorney
| that is "good" with legalese, but the practice actually
| represents dishonesty. And attorneys are expected to catch these
| unclear legal language, but most won't complain b/c it requires a
| few extra hours of back and forth for which they can charge money
| for. If software is going to eat law, I hope one of the
| consequences of that is better allocation of legal services and
| more transparency in legal contracts
| txbuck wrote:
| 'Illegalese' has a nice ring to it.
| cheph wrote:
| The site is horrible. Like really really bad. Hard to read, ugly,
| confusing. I mean I don't want to be negative, I want to give
| good feedback, but I can't even copy what i want to respond to.
| pierre wrote:
| If you are intrigued by the idea that law can and will be
| represented as computer code / data, here are a few link to go
| deeper : * British national act as a logic program (1982): the
| paper that is the based of most current effort in this domain
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti...
|
| * Standford codex LSP initiative that try to standarize the
| format in which legal rule will be encoded
| https://law.stanford.edu/publications/developing-a-legal-spe...
| (as far as I know the initiative is still going, don't hesitate
| to contact oliver goodenough if you want to get involved)
|
| * OECD recently published a full repport on current initiative in
| the domain https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/cracking-the-
| code_3...
|
| * There was a workshop at last ICAIL where a lot of people showed
| their progress on the topic (link to all demo video in this gdoc
| :
| https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-7cJ0KsYzQ8IOY3L_bYX...)
|
| * MIT started a journal on the topic ~1 year ago
| https://law.mit.edu/
|
| If you want to work on this topic DM me :)
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| > and will be
|
| strong doubt. laws are by definition supposed to be ,,soft" and
| not hardcoded. see the smart contract hacks. this simply
| doesn't happen in law, because the spirit plays a large role,
| and the spirit is something thay cannot be coded
| bsedlm wrote:
| I firmly believe that it will be. However it won't be anytime
| soon because this entails a transition similar to going from
| rule by king to rule by laws.
|
| The law is (nowdays) is backed by writing, and since I think
| that computing is a next step in the evolution of writing
| (along with printing press) one day---likely in dozens of
| generations (hundreds of years)---the law will be backed by
| computing.
|
| All these technologies change the nature of a human's
| consiouness; it will take hundreds of years. Look at Walter
| Ong's work for better made arguments along these lines
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong
| zdkl wrote:
| You're missing the point that flexibility of interpretation
| and "execution" is a very much desired feature.
| bsedlm wrote:
| And you're missing the point that these things exist for
| humans
| divyekapoor wrote:
| +1 Law is human-to-human agreement about a lot of vague
| soft stuff. Code APIs are computer-computer agreement.
|
| Some exceptions to the above are: 1. Financial contracts
| (see ISDA derivatives). They're written with a big
| "human" document upfront and then there's a "notification
| addendum" attached to each use of that contract. 2.
| Master Sales Agreements (MSAs): The first MSA is a human-
| to-human agreement. Everything after that is order-forms.
| And negotiating the MSA requirements is very very human
| (risk, trust, effort, cost, benefit & promises). Order
| forms are pricing decisions that can be "automated"
| (especially around annual renewals if within budget
| without red flags).
| ska wrote:
| > these things exist for humans
|
| so does law.
| schoen wrote:
| One position I've heard is that cultural concepts that are
| used in legislation or contracts ("reasonable effort",
| "reasonably foreseeable", "undue risk") may always be
| assessed subjectively by humans, but that the logical
| structure of rules and conditions ("any of the following",
| "none of the following", "two or more of the following") may
| not be.
|
| There are lots of drafting disputes about things where
| someone wrote something like
|
| > a and b or c
|
| leading lawyers to argue about whether this should be read as
| ((a and b) or c) or (a and (b or c)).
|
| There's no reason that this kind of ambiguity should have
| been permitted to exist in the first place.
|
| I think my understanding of this is related to my
| understanding of Lojban, which tries to avoid all syntactic
| ambiguities but explicitly says that it's a non-goal to avoid
| ambiguities related to the cultural meaning of words and
| concepts. Like if you say something is "medieval" or "fun" or
| "convenient" or "beautiful" or "fair" or "postmodern", Lojban
| doesn't try to make the truth-conditions for your statement
| objective with regard to what these concepts do or don't
| refer to. But to the extent that that's agreed between two
| people, they should then agree on what a particular sentence
| using these concepts means or doesn't mean.
|
| Though I do envision that when people use better tools for
| avoiding parsing ambiguities in legal texts, they will still
| argue (and there will be many legal philosophers insisting)
| that they should still be permitted to argue that something
| was still a drafting error, because the (only permitted)
| interpretation under the drafting formalism is manifestly
| unfair or unreasonable and could not have captured their true
| intention.
| slver wrote:
| I've been thinking about this for literally decades.
|
| Unfortunately while the idea is solid, and very much viable, it's
| all about institutional inertia, not merely technical ability.
| Good luck to this startup, and I mean it.
| abraxaz wrote:
| There has been a lot of work using OWL and RDF to represent laws
| and contracts and to use it for compliance checking.
|
| For more information see:
|
| - https://finregont.com/ : Semantic compliance in finance
|
| - https://bankontology.com/ : Semantic bank compliance
|
| - https://www.smartlogic.com/home : I think this company uses
| semantic technologies and AI to do legal compliance checking
|
| - https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02062174/document :
| Automation of legal reasoning and decision based on ontologies
| (PhD thesis on the topic)
|
| - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sema...
| : search google scholar for semantic legal compliance
|
| I know there are more companies doing it, just don't know their
| names right now.
|
| The benefits of this is:
|
| - Don't need yet another DSL, RDF works fine, and it's already
| being widely used.
|
| - A lot of the world is already modelled in OWL (e.g.
| Organizational Ontology, Provenance Ontology, literally too many
| to list)
|
| - Already have a good query language with inference support
| (SPARQL)
| abraxaz wrote:
| Check this out also: https://data.finlex.fi/en/main - Semantic
| Finlex - Finnish Law and Justice as Linked Open Data
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(page generated 2021-05-17 23:00 UTC)