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There's a well known book on law called "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". And in this book, it more or less calls out this scenario on the first page. http

There's a well known book on law called "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". And in this book, it more or less calls out this scenario on the first page. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5687&context=journal_articles https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... "The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions, it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community." I've thought a lot about this because it directly impacts whether you could turn a contract into code. Code is for the most part very deterministic - you can expect that the logic you use will be interpreted in the same way every time given the same inputs. When that isn't the case, it's generally considered a bug. Law and contracts appear to be deterministic, but are in fact not. Anything that is written into a law or contract is subject to interpretation later. There's no attempt at making it exhaustive because it's not possible, nor is it necessarily desirable. Sometimes contracts contain language that becomes invalid later on, and you don't want to define things too tightly or you'll have to modify the contract non-stop. Sometimes things arise which are not spelled out in the contract and as long as the parties agree, there's no problem. The rules around contracts are a lot more bendable than in code, and "it depends" is quite often the answer to many questions. So is there overlap between code and contracts/law? Certainly. But the deeper you go, the more exceptions that arise.

davidm888 5y ago
I agree completely, and the quote you cited more eloquently describes what I was trying to convey in some of my earlier comments. Coming from a software-development mindset, I started practicing law twenty years ago, and the hardest adjustment to make was to understand that even though the law seemed analogous to deterministic code on the surface, in reality it is much different. Today, both writing code and practicing law, I still have to remind myself of the difference sometimes. It is a completely different mindset when dealing with ambiguity, especially in the cases where ambiguity is sometimes desired, welcomed, or necessary. It is also eye-opening to realize that the parties never consider all of the future possibilities, and as such, it's not even possible for a document, however syntactically correct, to convey the intent of the parties 100% -- they don't even know their full intent as to infinite possibilities. I think many of the commenters, just like I did before, struggle to understand this. They don't realize that the "flaw" they're trying to correct is actually a feature -- a messy, sometimes annoying, irrational, subjective, human, necessary feature that's actually an important part of the functioning of society. It's intoxicating to think of a purely logical society driven by immutable, consistent, and brutally efficient laws for everyone, but upon further thought, it's a bit terrifying. Thankfully, it's also impossible.

davidm888 5y ago

I agree completely, and the quote you cited more eloquently describes what I was trying to convey in some of my earlier comments. Coming from a software-development mindset, I started practicing law twenty years ago, and the hardest adjustment to make was to understand that even though the law seemed analogous to deterministic code on the surface, in reality it is much different. Today, both writing code and practicing law, I still have to remind myself of the difference sometimes. It is a completely different mindset when dealing with ambiguity, especially in the cases where ambiguity is sometimes desired, welcomed, or necessary. It is also eye-opening to realize that the parties never consider all of the future possibilities, and as such, it's not even possible for a document, however syntactically correct, to convey the intent of the parties 100% -- they don't even know their full intent as to infinite possibilities. I think many of the commenters, just like I did before, struggle to understand this. They don't realize that the "flaw" they're trying to correct is actually a feature -- a messy, sometimes annoying, irrational, subjective, human, necessary feature that's actually an important part of the functioning of society. It's intoxicating to think of a purely logical society driven by immutable, consistent, and brutally efficient laws for everyone, but upon further thought, it's a bit terrifying. Thankfully, it's also impossible.