I remember thinking that this was a good idea, in my first year of law. By the third year I had rather given up on the idea. Legal writing is already well-spe

I remember thinking that this was a good idea, in my first year of law. By the third year I had rather given up on the idea. Legal writing is already well-specified. The problem is not with the language that the law is written in. The problem is that the world is irreducibly complex and the law cannot shrink its domain from "everything humans have done, do, will do, or could do; interacting with other humans, dead, alive, unborn; interacting with objects, in their homes, in public, on private property, belonging to them, belonging to others, belonging to nobody; on the surface of the earth, underneath the earth, in the seas, in the international seas, in the skies, in orbit, on the moon, the limits of human space; with ideas, owned and unowned, with multiple kinds of ownership; in concert with other legal systems, or in contrast, or in direct mutually incompatible conflict; without limit, forever". Which is probably a fraction of it. Quite aside from scope, there is ordinary fuzzy logic: in coming to a conclusion, judges must give consideration to concepts that cannot be crisply, discretely encoded: "the buyer without notice at arm's length", the "reasonable person, similarly circumstanced" and so forth. These are all supported by cases. Mounds and mounds of cases. Case-based reasoning is a well-explored area of AI, but it hasn't been to any avail. Civil legal systems try to go without caselaw and have pure statute in the fashion that this kind of idle daydream typically tries to express. And they've had hundreds and hundreds of years to get the "perfect" drafting. Bugs are still showing up. All that it does is shift the burden of adjustment to a slower, central bureaucracy from a self-correcting, distributed, multi-level system. We still need humans to make sense of humans. For the foreseeable future this can be expected to continue. The law isn't going anywhere.