7 ms·

As a lawyer I've thought a lot about this (and if anyone is working on this and wants to talk get in touch). There are two reasons: 1. Reasoning in law relies

As a lawyer I've thought a lot about this (and if anyone is working on this and wants to talk get in touch). There are two reasons: 1. Reasoning in law relies on complex language semantics, both in statute and case law. Take for example a court decision that says "in the circumstances of this case I do not agree that John v Doe applies". That can be expressed a million ways and I'm not sure our natural language processing can replace humans yet in this area. 2. There is a lot of copyright problems that need to be overcome. Companies like Lexis and Westlaw own the rights to a lot of decisions and even statutes and can paywall the . This is slowly changing however, for example in the UK recently the courts took back the rights to publish decisions.

nawtacawp 10y ago
It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied.
- eelliott 10y ago
  I agree entirely however law is like all professions where access to information is only half the equation, its application and interpretation is derived from extensive training and experience. So I'd argue that until we nail 'Google for the law', access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    >access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases That itself is a problem, while we have public defense lawyers, we don't have public preventive lawyers (who I can call and ask if what I'm about to do is altogether legal and what can I do to avoid run-ins with the law).
    - Spivak 10y ago
      That's not really the service we want because those lawyers won't be able to give definitive answers for all but the simplest cases. What I think you really want is a government sponsored law office that is given special privileges. 1. They are tasked to give well researched legal advice in all fields. 2. Their advice should be minimally restrictive. 3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability. Individuals are not capable of evaluating the law without the aid of legal professionals. Worse, individuals don't have the ability to evaluate the quality of lawyers. This system would allow individuals to be secure that they're not heading into legal gray areas or situations where the legality is truly unknown until there's a trial. I like this kind of system because it's in the best interest of such an office to give the most accurate advice possible.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > 2. Their advice should be minimally restrictive. > 3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability. The problem is these two are in conflict. If the office gets in trouble for approving something they shouldn't then they'll have the incentive to be overly restrictive in what they approve. A better solution is to make this office a subdivision of the justice department and then if they say you're allowed to do it then you can't be prosecuted for it. And if they say you aren't allowed to do it then you can hire your own lawyer to appeal the decision to a court, and they get penalties for being wrong.
        jacalata 10y ago
        This sounds like a process for giving any citizen standing to challenge a law, which I think would be a very significant change to the way the system works today. It naively sounds like a good change, but I suspect there would be some ill effects - e.g, companies asking over and over about slightly different ways to manage taxes to try and find a loophole, people on both sides of the Obamacare contraception mandate trying to prove that loopholes did or did not exist in the law...
  - kevinpet 10y ago
    If you start from the assumption that the law is whatever lawyers and judges tend to think it is, then access to lawyers is more important. If you take the egalitarian perspective that the law is the law and a lawyer is just someone particularly skilled in applying it, then a person of average eduction should be able to handle a routine legal dispute without paying a specialist. This is what people have in mind when they want to make the law more available online. If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.
    - arcbyte 10y ago
      The problem is that both of your assumptions are true. The fact is that the law is constantly being discovered. To the extent that an area of law is well explored, a layperson should be empowered to handle it alone, but to the extent that it is not, it requires abilities that have not been instilled in the average citizen.
  - dgreisen 10y ago
    There are several places where I strongly believe that access to the law can meaningfully improve access to justice. And I hope, through our work at Open Law Library, we can show this to be true. 1) Educated lay-people. If you have good reading comprehension, and if your problem is one many other people have faced, there is a chance the law that pertains to your situation is clear and unambiguous. Access to the law in this case means you can resolve your issue. 2) Legal services at the margin. At the high end, where you are paying an attorney hundreds of dollars per hour, that attorney is passing database costs straight through to you, but you can afford it. At the low end, legal aid clinics usually receive free or reduced cost access to the databases. However, at the margin, when you are scraping together the money to pay a $30/hr lawyer to represent you in a civil matter, neither you nor the lawyer can afford to pay. It is in these cases on the margin where access to high quality laws can make a significant difference. 3) Secondary legal sources. Many legal aid clinics put out high quality secondary sources written at a grade school reading level. Where I volunteered, we had around 100. We could have had many, many more. They don't really take that long to write and the number of people helped per hour of writing was quite high. The problem, however, was maintaining them. Each document we added to our library represented a commitment of several hours to a couple days of work quarterly or biannually to review the law and update the document. It was this maintenance commitment that limited our ability to provide understandable legal documents. This time commitment can be cut by an order of magnitude by pushing pertinent changes to the law to legal aid clinics, rather than them having to sort through all laws for pertinent changes. 4) Government opinions. Many governments have legal departments that will provide opinions on the law. These opinions are often (though not always) written with a general audience in mind, and explain a particularly complex or often misunderstood part of the law. Unfortunately, these opinions are not easily discoverable, especially if you don't even know to look for them. Open Law Library works with jurisdictions to help them coordinate publishing, linking, and discoverability across branches and departments. Into the future, as we build the foundation of computer-readable laws, others will build tools, apps, and bots on top of this foundation that will make the law truly accessible to all.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied. Well, that's incompatible with a common law legal system. Common law literally means that we respect legal traditions that aren't always codified and are instead established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition. That's the reason you'll sometimes see precolonial British law cited in US legal memorandums or court rulings - those laws literally are not part of US legal code, but they may provide persuasive precedent. So there not always a codified law to read, but that doesn't mean people can't be expected to uphold the societal structure. The same works in reverse. If a law exists, it's possible for the law to become legally unenforceable (for a variety of reasons, not just court rulings) even without the law being repealed. So merely providing access to the legal code doesn't actually provide a complete picture of what the law is. Engineers want to think about the law the way they think about code - it may not always do what you expect, but Von Neumann architecture means that it's at least consistent. But that's not how the law works - it's not always clear ahead of time what the inputs are (which is why litigation is so complicated), and that's even before you account for the judgment calls that enter the picture at different stages.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > Common law literally means that we respect legal traditions that aren't always codified and are instead established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition. If access to court decisions is restricted, they hardly qualify as "established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition", no?
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      I'm saying that the set of things that can comprise "law" in a common law legal system is impossible to define precisely. So you could always find some obscure, hard-to-obtain source documenting a legal custom that could be used as persuasive precedent. If we stated that (say) criminal laws could not be enforced unless the defendant had access to the full body of possible codes and precedent before the crime occurred, we would literally never be able to convict a single case, ever. Because any defense attorney could just find some arcane memo and prove that the defendant could not reasonably have been expected to have access to it before the crime occurred, and that would be sufficient for excusing them of culpability. And that's not even raising the question of whether or not they could reasonably be expected to interpret and understand the text, which would be the next hurdle. (The same applies to non-criminal cases too.) (Persuasive precedent is not binding, so it's not "law", but it's undeniably influential enough that it's necessary to understanding the law.)
- posterboy 10y ago
  That defense is for particular reasons not going to work. The supposition is trivial whether the texts are paywalled or not, because the shear amount of text doesn't leave any chance to read it all. Clearly though, reasons for the texts to be free are obvious and reasons against it are less than before the proliferation of the internet.
vqc 10y ago
#2 is a really big barrier to innovation in this space. Another issue is that the economics of codification and publishing disincentives existing publishers from releasing laws and codes in open and accessible formats. And without open and accessible formats, it makes it extremely difficult and unsustainable to build things on top of the law.
dustingetz 10y ago
what do you think of 3) the way we make law is deliberately "broken" such that inconsistent laws can be passed (with humans in the loop to sort it out) otherwise nothing would pass - if we could build a type checker for laws, active law would not type check and would be impossible to fix
- eelliott 10y ago
  This approach doesn't acknowledge that law is a dynamically typed language, to continue your analogy. It responds to societal concerns and emotional and frequently irrational reasoning. There's a saying bad cases make bad law and I think this isn't going to change any time soon.
  - Shicholas 10y ago
    haha dynamically typed language with no log trail!
    - saghm 10y ago
      So basically the law is Brainfuck?
      - Shicholas 10y ago
        haha except the fucking is more than just a brain
  - posterboy 10y ago
    Nevertheless dynamic languages can fail to typecheck. To continue the analogy: try { fair (trail); } catch (e) { if (e == InconsistentLawException) { // Oops, divided by zero, // add a tiny epsilon to the denominator and keep going law += epsilon; } else if (e == ClassCastException) { // some types are more equal than others settlement (trail); } else { // escalate to higher instance mapReduce (court); } } finally { // might silently fail if // higher_instance == SCOTUS and // SCOTUS.busy == true sentence (trial) . await (appeal (higherinstance)); }
Sakes 10y ago
If you are in either Texas or California check out https://www.oconnors.com/ https://www.oconnors.com/ (formerly Jones McClure Publishing) They have an online reader for all their legal commentary books. They've invested heavily in search. It is pretty fantastic.
- maddyboo 10y ago
  They only have one book listed for California. Do you know of any similar companies more focused on CA? I'm specifically interested in the Vehicle Code.
  - Sakes 10y ago
    I'll reach out to them. I used to do some contract coding for them. They may have more books for Cali that haven't made it to the marketing site.
  - Sakes 10y ago
    You were originally correct. They currently have one book specific to California. They do have federal books as well that apply nation wide, but as most lawyers are highly specialized, that may not apply to what you do?
Shicholas 10y ago
hey eelliot. I'd love to get in touch. I'm a dev/lawyer to get more of my state's local laws/cases/templates on Github here in Vegas. Best way to contact you?
- eelliott 10y ago
  Drop me a line eddie (at) technicality.io
geebee 10y ago
For point one, it seems like increasing access would still help. It takes a lot of skill to read a mathematical proof and know if it is relevant to an open theorem, but making math publication public and searchable is still useful. Im bummed to hear about point 2. We are all ruled by law, and the courts are a branch of government. Its not encouraging to know the legal documents that are used to govern me are owned and copyrighted by a private organization.
elgenie 10y ago
Can #2 really stand up to scrutiny? My understanding is that decisions and statutes are not copyrightable in the US as they are "edicts of government", and thus owning rights to them aught to be impossible.
nroach 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Lexis and Westlaw don't own the text of published cases or statutes. They do own the headnotes which are commonly seen in printed and electronic reporters. See in part: MATTHEW BENDER & CO. v. WEST PUBLISHING CO., 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998)
BjoernKW 10y ago
I am not a lawyer but I from my computational linguistics background I have some experience with Legal English: 1. From my admittedly limited experience legal language, while certainly complex, follows a clear set of rules to the extent its almost formulaic. There's no pragmatics (pragmatics is the main reason we don't have generalised natural language understanding yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics ) involved. Legal language is precise and its primary objective is to avoid ambiguity or potential for misinterpretation. These features actually make legal documents a perfect area for application of NLP algorithms. 2. Frankly, I think this is outrageous. It's "Common Law" for a reason. How can one expect someone to abide by the law if the law is not commonly known but that knowledge is restricted to a select few? How law firms like those you mentioned could arrive at thinking about copyrighting legal decisions and thinking that's even remotely ethical is beyond me.
wehadfun 10y ago
How do companies own the rights to legal decisions? Can you not go to the court and purchase them somehow?
dclowd9901 10y ago
Uhm... isn't the entire _point_ of legal writing to be as unobfuscated and clear as possible? "Processing" legal documents should be tantamount to mapping words with boolean operators. If it's not, the problem isn't with the software engineers...

nawtacawp 10y ago

It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied.

eelliott 10y ago
I agree entirely however law is like all professions where access to information is only half the equation, its application and interpretation is derived from extensive training and experience. So I'd argue that until we nail 'Google for the law', access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases
- dispose13432 10y ago
  >access to free lawyers at least for the poor etc is more important than access to the legal databases That itself is a problem, while we have public defense lawyers, we don't have public preventive lawyers (who I can call and ask if what I'm about to do is altogether legal and what can I do to avoid run-ins with the law).
  - Spivak 10y ago
    That's not really the service we want because those lawyers won't be able to give definitive answers for all but the simplest cases. What I think you really want is a government sponsored law office that is given special privileges. 1. They are tasked to give well researched legal advice in all fields. 2. Their advice should be minimally restrictive. 3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability. Individuals are not capable of evaluating the law without the aid of legal professionals. Worse, individuals don't have the ability to evaluate the quality of lawyers. This system would allow individuals to be secure that they're not heading into legal gray areas or situations where the legality is truly unknown until there's a trial. I like this kind of system because it's in the best interest of such an office to give the most accurate advice possible.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > 2. Their advice should be minimally restrictive. > 3. If a person faithfully follows the advice of the office the office assumes criminal and civil liability. The problem is these two are in conflict. If the office gets in trouble for approving something they shouldn't then they'll have the incentive to be overly restrictive in what they approve. A better solution is to make this office a subdivision of the justice department and then if they say you're allowed to do it then you can't be prosecuted for it. And if they say you aren't allowed to do it then you can hire your own lawyer to appeal the decision to a court, and they get penalties for being wrong.
      - jacalata 10y ago
        This sounds like a process for giving any citizen standing to challenge a law, which I think would be a very significant change to the way the system works today. It naively sounds like a good change, but I suspect there would be some ill effects - e.g, companies asking over and over about slightly different ways to manage taxes to try and find a loophole, people on both sides of the Obamacare contraception mandate trying to prove that loopholes did or did not exist in the law...
- kevinpet 10y ago
  If you start from the assumption that the law is whatever lawyers and judges tend to think it is, then access to lawyers is more important. If you take the egalitarian perspective that the law is the law and a lawyer is just someone particularly skilled in applying it, then a person of average eduction should be able to handle a routine legal dispute without paying a specialist. This is what people have in mind when they want to make the law more available online. If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.
  - arcbyte 10y ago
    The problem is that both of your assumptions are true. The fact is that the law is constantly being discovered. To the extent that an area of law is well explored, a layperson should be empowered to handle it alone, but to the extent that it is not, it requires abilities that have not been instilled in the average citizen.
- dgreisen 10y ago
  There are several places where I strongly believe that access to the law can meaningfully improve access to justice. And I hope, through our work at Open Law Library, we can show this to be true. 1) Educated lay-people. If you have good reading comprehension, and if your problem is one many other people have faced, there is a chance the law that pertains to your situation is clear and unambiguous. Access to the law in this case means you can resolve your issue. 2) Legal services at the margin. At the high end, where you are paying an attorney hundreds of dollars per hour, that attorney is passing database costs straight through to you, but you can afford it. At the low end, legal aid clinics usually receive free or reduced cost access to the databases. However, at the margin, when you are scraping together the money to pay a $30/hr lawyer to represent you in a civil matter, neither you nor the lawyer can afford to pay. It is in these cases on the margin where access to high quality laws can make a significant difference. 3) Secondary legal sources. Many legal aid clinics put out high quality secondary sources written at a grade school reading level. Where I volunteered, we had around 100. We could have had many, many more. They don't really take that long to write and the number of people helped per hour of writing was quite high. The problem, however, was maintaining them. Each document we added to our library represented a commitment of several hours to a couple days of work quarterly or biannually to review the law and update the document. It was this maintenance commitment that limited our ability to provide understandable legal documents. This time commitment can be cut by an order of magnitude by pushing pertinent changes to the law to legal aid clinics, rather than them having to sort through all laws for pertinent changes. 4) Government opinions. Many governments have legal departments that will provide opinions on the law. These opinions are often (though not always) written with a general audience in mind, and explain a particularly complex or often misunderstood part of the law. Unfortunately, these opinions are not easily discoverable, especially if you don't even know to look for them. Open Law Library works with jurisdictions to help them coordinate publishing, linking, and discoverability across branches and departments. Into the future, as we build the foundation of computer-readable laws, others will build tools, apps, and bots on top of this foundation that will make the law truly accessible to all.
chimeracoder 10y ago
> It does not seem ethical to hold a person accountable for not following a law, if they do not have free access to read that law and the various ways the court has ruled to how that law should be applied. Well, that's incompatible with a common law legal system. Common law literally means that we respect legal traditions that aren't always codified and are instead established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition. That's the reason you'll sometimes see precolonial British law cited in US legal memorandums or court rulings - those laws literally are not part of US legal code, but they may provide persuasive precedent. So there not always a codified law to read, but that doesn't mean people can't be expected to uphold the societal structure. The same works in reverse. If a law exists, it's possible for the law to become legally unenforceable (for a variety of reasons, not just court rulings) even without the law being repealed. So merely providing access to the legal code doesn't actually provide a complete picture of what the law is. Engineers want to think about the law the way they think about code - it may not always do what you expect, but Von Neumann architecture means that it's at least consistent. But that's not how the law works - it's not always clear ahead of time what the inputs are (which is why litigation is so complicated), and that's even before you account for the judgment calls that enter the picture at different stages.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > Common law literally means that we respect legal traditions that aren't always codified and are instead established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition. If access to court decisions is restricted, they hardly qualify as "established by precedent and/or consensus via tradition", no?
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    I'm saying that the set of things that can comprise "law" in a common law legal system is impossible to define precisely. So you could always find some obscure, hard-to-obtain source documenting a legal custom that could be used as persuasive precedent. If we stated that (say) criminal laws could not be enforced unless the defendant had access to the full body of possible codes and precedent before the crime occurred, we would literally never be able to convict a single case, ever. Because any defense attorney could just find some arcane memo and prove that the defendant could not reasonably have been expected to have access to it before the crime occurred, and that would be sufficient for excusing them of culpability. And that's not even raising the question of whether or not they could reasonably be expected to interpret and understand the text, which would be the next hurdle. (The same applies to non-criminal cases too.) (Persuasive precedent is not binding, so it's not "law", but it's undeniably influential enough that it's necessary to understanding the law.)
posterboy 10y ago
That defense is for particular reasons not going to work. The supposition is trivial whether the texts are paywalled or not, because the shear amount of text doesn't leave any chance to read it all. Clearly though, reasons for the texts to be free are obvious and reasons against it are less than before the proliferation of the internet.

vqc 10y ago

#2 is a really big barrier to innovation in this space. Another issue is that the economics of codification and publishing disincentives existing publishers from releasing laws and codes in open and accessible formats. And without open and accessible formats, it makes it extremely difficult and unsustainable to build things on top of the law.

dustingetz 10y ago

what do you think of 3) the way we make law is deliberately "broken" such that inconsistent laws can be passed (with humans in the loop to sort it out) otherwise nothing would pass - if we could build a type checker for laws, active law would not type check and would be impossible to fix

eelliott 10y ago
This approach doesn't acknowledge that law is a dynamically typed language, to continue your analogy. It responds to societal concerns and emotional and frequently irrational reasoning. There's a saying bad cases make bad law and I think this isn't going to change any time soon.
- Shicholas 10y ago
  haha dynamically typed language with no log trail!
  - saghm 10y ago
    So basically the law is Brainfuck?
    - Shicholas 10y ago
      haha except the fucking is more than just a brain
- posterboy 10y ago
  Nevertheless dynamic languages can fail to typecheck. To continue the analogy: try { fair (trail); } catch (e) { if (e == InconsistentLawException) { // Oops, divided by zero, // add a tiny epsilon to the denominator and keep going law += epsilon; } else if (e == ClassCastException) { // some types are more equal than others settlement (trail); } else { // escalate to higher instance mapReduce (court); } } finally { // might silently fail if // higher_instance == SCOTUS and // SCOTUS.busy == true sentence (trial) . await (appeal (higherinstance)); }

Sakes 10y ago

If you are in either Texas or California check out https://www.oconnors.com/ https://www.oconnors.com/ (formerly Jones McClure Publishing) They have an online reader for all their legal commentary books. They've invested heavily in search. It is pretty fantastic.

maddyboo 10y ago
They only have one book listed for California. Do you know of any similar companies more focused on CA? I'm specifically interested in the Vehicle Code.
- Sakes 10y ago
  I'll reach out to them. I used to do some contract coding for them. They may have more books for Cali that haven't made it to the marketing site.
- Sakes 10y ago
  You were originally correct. They currently have one book specific to California. They do have federal books as well that apply nation wide, but as most lawyers are highly specialized, that may not apply to what you do?

Shicholas 10y ago

hey eelliot. I'd love to get in touch. I'm a dev/lawyer to get more of my state's local laws/cases/templates on Github here in Vegas. Best way to contact you?

eelliott 10y ago
Drop me a line eddie (at) technicality.io

geebee 10y ago

For point one, it seems like increasing access would still help. It takes a lot of skill to read a mathematical proof and know if it is relevant to an open theorem, but making math publication public and searchable is still useful. Im bummed to hear about point 2. We are all ruled by law, and the courts are a branch of government. Its not encouraging to know the legal documents that are used to govern me are owned and copyrighted by a private organization.

elgenie 10y ago

Can #2 really stand up to scrutiny? My understanding is that decisions and statutes are not copyrightable in the US as they are "edicts of government", and thus owning rights to them aught to be impossible.

nroach 10y ago

I'm pretty sure Lexis and Westlaw don't own the text of published cases or statutes. They do own the headnotes which are commonly seen in printed and electronic reporters. See in part: MATTHEW BENDER & CO. v. WEST PUBLISHING CO., 158 F.3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998)

BjoernKW 10y ago

I am not a lawyer but I from my computational linguistics background I have some experience with Legal English: 1. From my admittedly limited experience legal language, while certainly complex, follows a clear set of rules to the extent its almost formulaic. There's no pragmatics (pragmatics is the main reason we don't have generalised natural language understanding yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics ) involved. Legal language is precise and its primary objective is to avoid ambiguity or potential for misinterpretation. These features actually make legal documents a perfect area for application of NLP algorithms. 2. Frankly, I think this is outrageous. It's "Common Law" for a reason. How can one expect someone to abide by the law if the law is not commonly known but that knowledge is restricted to a select few? How law firms like those you mentioned could arrive at thinking about copyrighting legal decisions and thinking that's even remotely ethical is beyond me.

wehadfun 10y ago

How do companies own the rights to legal decisions? Can you not go to the court and purchase them somehow?

dclowd9901 10y ago

Uhm... isn't the entire _point_ of legal writing to be as unobfuscated and clear as possible? "Processing" legal documents should be tantamount to mapping words with boolean operators. If it's not, the problem isn't with the software engineers...