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Legal code is logical. Very. You might not be able to read it, but that's because you haven't learned the language yet. And like any code, real-world applicati
by groby_b 11y ago
Legal code is logical. Very. You might not be able to read it, but that's because you haven't learned the language yet.
And like any code, real-world applications are much harder to read than textbook examples.
- mbrock 11y agoThat's why I figure formalization should be relatively straightforward. The PDF someone linked to about a Prolog-based formalization of UK citizenship legislation is a perfect example. Code should be executable, queryable, checkable, and so on. Legal code translated into a logical skeleton would obviously be more amenable to visualization and other interesting things. Then everyone wouldn't have to learn the language; we could develop tools for people to query the data at different levels of sophistication.
- wpietri 11y agoI would love to see people trying to create these sorts of representations. But I suspect we're decades away from actually making the shift you want in the primary documents. Computer languages are made to be executed by computers. But the execution medium for human laws is human minds. And most of the relevant human minds have law degrees. So a computer-friendly translation of laws will be always be extra work until the execution medium changes. Machine translation is making great progress, though, so perhaps we can automate away the problem.
- tylershuster 11y agoThat's one of the features http://www.commonaccord.org/ http://www.commonaccord.org/ is trying to achieve, as I understand it.