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Interesting blog, showing the banking-side view. The call for 'executable-regulation' reminded me that lawyers also pride themselves on their fine analytical mi

by ableal 17y ago

Interesting blog, showing the banking-side view. The call for 'executable-regulation' reminded me that lawyers also pride themselves on their fine analytical minds, piling up sharp clauses to cover this and that. I suspect that, if they could, and would, run unit tests on their products, there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. On the other hand, we already have that with the current system, and that's perhaps the point of it. The making of sausages, and all that.

binarymax 17y ago
" The idea that while ABS documents are chock full of legalese, a computer program can provide a very concise way of understanding how a financial instrument is supposed to operate." That is extremely interesting. A good friend of mine is a lawyer and used to work on large financial contracts (with sometimes billions of dollars in a single contract). He would tell me crazy stories about how two legal teams would spend hours arguing over things like the placement of a semicolon. So in reality legal contracts really are code...just a code for lawyers and not computers. I would not be surprised in the least if computer code was more efficient, but it may take just as long to write (if not longer). The upside is that while lawyer code needs to be tested in court, computer code gets tested by compilers and private QA teams, significantly shortening the process and relieving a significant portion of bureaucracy.