As someone who studied law, I agree with your general sentiment. I was not implying that programmers do that. ;-) I would however temper your dismissal of "ave

As someone who studied law, I agree with your general sentiment. I was not implying that programmers do that. ;-) I would however temper your dismissal of "average grads": in lawmaking too, drafts may be written or refined by young people who need to learn! But not without ultimate supervision, of course. Just like young code monkeys are totally able to touch production code in some settings. As for the deeper matter, "the range of considerations to be encoded into a country's operating principles..." — love the wording, btw. There's a long way until we are anywhere near expressing the full range of human languages in 'machine compatible' code, programming languages. One could argue there's not even a point in that, since you essentially attain redundancy; and there are more promising ways like ML to tackle the linguistic problem. However it's not black-and-white, the entire sum of norms that apply to us is a crazy vast space, and one that all (individuals and companies) should "optimize" to their particular case. In this as in many things, computing tools can help — and we certainly don't replace surgeons, senators or judges, we should already be content to immensely enhance their capabilities through technology. IMHO. "Refactoring" was my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that there's much to do in the way of organizing information in the legal space: datasets from which to base logic or standards upon are basically non-existent beyond non-computable literature (that could be modeled, we're talking structure of the law not content, hierarchy and structure of norms, not what citizens put into it). Morphing said structure to become mappable is nigh-impossible to do without concerted effort of most parties. I vetted first-hand some ideas with people working in the field, but the general obstacle is more economical, it's a business strategy/politics problem more than a technical one. I have no idea myself but I doubt this quadri-centennial culture is in any way, shape of form less entrenched at the highest public/federal/international levels.