5 ms·

What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.

by ph0rque 15y ago

noonespecial 15y ago
That'd be a neat trick. Not even the humans can understand legal language. Perhaps the singularity begins with an expert system suddenly grokking the entirety of law, resolving the paradoxes and contradictions, and then suing all humanity for infringement. Hard-takeoff trolling...
- thret 15y ago
  If that isn't already a science fiction short story, it should be.
  - ph0rque 15y ago
    And a research project, a partnership between the law school and the CS department of a university... EDIT: just saw swampthing's comment below, such things exist.
  - jgfoot 15y ago
    Asimov's "I, Robot" stories cover this territory well. The robots must follow three laws, which are simple enough on their surface, but in application prove tough to predict. The humans begin to see that the laws have unintended and undesirable consequences.
  - thwarted 15y ago
    I just recently finished Accelerando, where corporations are composed of and contracts are carried out by software agents (the story starts out with them just being expert systems). It's not the main topic, but a major supporting background.
swampthing 15y ago
There's projects on this - one of the best known ones (to my knowledge) is the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse Project: http://www.lexmachina.org/ http://www.lexmachina.org/
- sunchild 15y ago
  Yes, litigation and compliance tend to lead the way when it comes to extracting meaning from legal data pools. In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to getting legal knowledge to play nice with software is the fact that it is all "silo'ed" due to: (1) being in MS Word format, (2) being confidential information, and (3) the lack of conventions/standards in legal documents. The good news, though, is that legal documents tend to follow a fairly narrow channel of variations, when isolated to particular practice areas (e.g., leases, sales of goods, service agreements, motions, etc.) I've always wanted to run a huge number of documents through Beyesian filters or something similar to develop some interesting classification rules, but it's damn hard to get a pool of representative documents that isn't strictly confidential.
  - Zumzoa 15y ago
    The only word-processed files that might be non-confidential I can think of are contracts made in the past couple of decades between companies that have both declared bankruptcy. Either that or public EULAs.
  - VanL 15y ago
    I am doing this with patents. Google "Killing patents with Python" if you want to see the presentation.
    - sunchild 15y ago
      Shoot me an email. I didn't find your presentation. I did find a Yahoo Answers on "Can a 4 foot long ball python kill a 4 lb. kitten?"
      - 15y ago
etherael 15y ago
What's an interesting segue to this is that fundamentally the "language understanding" issues are mostly red herrings. The gold standard within the legal profession we are constantly led to believe is to pursue a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English. It is far, far easier to have laws written in code and execute test cases based on those laws before even investing any capital into a venture which may require edge cases of a given law, rather than the current scenario of hemming and hawing around a fundamentally subjective and fuzzy area and eventually subjecting your endeavour to the rigors of being a legal "test case" consisting of much ado about nothing and the outcome is as close to random as anything else. When you reduce the legal profession to coding and writing test cases though, hell will freeze over the next day. Such a politically powerful faction will never allow themselves to be marginalised in this way, even if they claim to desperately be striving for exactly the kind of scenarios that this would allow; universal access to a completely objective justice system with etc etc etc. The extent to which this is actually impossible is somewhat depressing because it's something of an expose on the hypocrisy implicit in the claims of the legal system to actually serve the public, rather than itself. But hey, that's life. If it ever does happen my wager is it will be because it is forced on them through market forces, the public at large simply uses alternatives venues for mediation and the legal system is forced to compete with it. I predict much artificial legal protection to prevent this from happening before it actually comes to pass, though.
- jgfoot 15y ago
  Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If you haven't already, take 30 minutes and read Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Path of the Law" and see if you still think the only obstacle to mechanizing the law is the political power of the legal profession. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373
thwarted 15y ago
That is kind of what we were heading towards in another thread from another post [1]. There seem to be a lot of law/lawyer related posts in past week. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432
lhnn 15y ago
Prolog: The language of lawyers.

What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.

by ph0rque 15y ago

What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.

noonespecial 15y ago

That'd be a neat trick. Not even the humans can understand legal language. Perhaps the singularity begins with an expert system suddenly grokking the entirety of law, resolving the paradoxes and contradictions, and then suing all humanity for infringement. Hard-takeoff trolling...

thret 15y ago
If that isn't already a science fiction short story, it should be.
- ph0rque 15y ago
  And a research project, a partnership between the law school and the CS department of a university... EDIT: just saw swampthing's comment below, such things exist.
- jgfoot 15y ago
  Asimov's "I, Robot" stories cover this territory well. The robots must follow three laws, which are simple enough on their surface, but in application prove tough to predict. The humans begin to see that the laws have unintended and undesirable consequences.
- thwarted 15y ago
  I just recently finished Accelerando, where corporations are composed of and contracts are carried out by software agents (the story starts out with them just being expert systems). It's not the main topic, but a major supporting background.

swampthing 15y ago

There's projects on this - one of the best known ones (to my knowledge) is the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse Project: http://www.lexmachina.org/ http://www.lexmachina.org/

sunchild 15y ago
Yes, litigation and compliance tend to lead the way when it comes to extracting meaning from legal data pools. In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to getting legal knowledge to play nice with software is the fact that it is all "silo'ed" due to: (1) being in MS Word format, (2) being confidential information, and (3) the lack of conventions/standards in legal documents. The good news, though, is that legal documents tend to follow a fairly narrow channel of variations, when isolated to particular practice areas (e.g., leases, sales of goods, service agreements, motions, etc.) I've always wanted to run a huge number of documents through Beyesian filters or something similar to develop some interesting classification rules, but it's damn hard to get a pool of representative documents that isn't strictly confidential.
- Zumzoa 15y ago
  The only word-processed files that might be non-confidential I can think of are contracts made in the past couple of decades between companies that have both declared bankruptcy. Either that or public EULAs.
- VanL 15y ago
  I am doing this with patents. Google "Killing patents with Python" if you want to see the presentation.
  - sunchild 15y ago
    Shoot me an email. I didn't find your presentation. I did find a Yahoo Answers on "Can a 4 foot long ball python kill a 4 lb. kitten?"
    - 15y ago

etherael 15y ago

What's an interesting segue to this is that fundamentally the "language understanding" issues are mostly red herrings. The gold standard within the legal profession we are constantly led to believe is to pursue a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English. It is far, far easier to have laws written in code and execute test cases based on those laws before even investing any capital into a venture which may require edge cases of a given law, rather than the current scenario of hemming and hawing around a fundamentally subjective and fuzzy area and eventually subjecting your endeavour to the rigors of being a legal "test case" consisting of much ado about nothing and the outcome is as close to random as anything else. When you reduce the legal profession to coding and writing test cases though, hell will freeze over the next day. Such a politically powerful faction will never allow themselves to be marginalised in this way, even if they claim to desperately be striving for exactly the kind of scenarios that this would allow; universal access to a completely objective justice system with etc etc etc. The extent to which this is actually impossible is somewhat depressing because it's something of an expose on the hypocrisy implicit in the claims of the legal system to actually serve the public, rather than itself. But hey, that's life. If it ever does happen my wager is it will be because it is forced on them through market forces, the public at large simply uses alternatives venues for mediation and the legal system is forced to compete with it. I predict much artificial legal protection to prevent this from happening before it actually comes to pass, though.

jgfoot 15y ago
Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If you haven't already, take 30 minutes and read Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Path of the Law" and see if you still think the only obstacle to mechanizing the law is the political power of the legal profession. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373

thwarted 15y ago

That is kind of what we were heading towards in another thread from another post [1]. There seem to be a lot of law/lawyer related posts in past week. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432

lhnn 15y ago

Prolog: The language of lawyers.