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As someone with a software development background, I always found legal language very interesting. It is like a very verbose, programming language. All sorts of

by hrunt 4y ago

As someone with a software development background, I always found legal language very interesting. It is like a very verbose, programming language. All sorts of words and phrases have very specific meanings that, when arranged in a certain order, produce specific, reproducible outcomes. Sections of contracts and laws reference other sections by name and reference, and the whole document (or set of documents) gets interpreted in a semi-rigid way. Just like computer programs, mistakes happen with legal languages, and when they do, they are typically have unintended consequences. (edited for a couple of missing words in the last sentence)

noman-land 4y ago
I have felt this way as well and wonder why we can't encode laws into some sort of machine code and study it, test it, iterate it, debug it, and optimize it like we do with computer programs.
- rastamutta 4y ago
  The space of things that can happen is just too large. You need a human, or some other neural network, to make judgment calls.
  - noman-land 4y ago
    But perhaps we can study the past judgement calls and relate them to which words were chosen.
- blep_ 4y ago
  People tried that. Unfortunately, it was immediately doomed because it was a blockchain thing. More seriously, this means you also have to accurately encode all the things the laws refer to, even when those things are vague judgement calls. It's easy to say "you can only have a noncompete agreement if it doesn't make it unreasonably difficult to find another job in the same industry", but hard to express "unreasonably difficult" or "same industry" with the kind of precision we expect from code. A sufficiently evil company would just pay a lawyer for a few days to find a loophole in whatever definitions you can think of. There's a reason the primary use of this is cryptocurrency conversion - it's a lot easier to enumerate all the failure modes in "give me n of A and I will give you m of B".
- JuettnerDistrib 4y ago
  > encode laws into some sort of machine code Don't need to encode it in some sort of machine code. Just need a git repo with the law so we can submit a PR to the CA assembly and get this fixed.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Because it would end up a weird machine [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_machine
  - noman-land 4y ago
    Thank you for this. I went down a 3 day rabbit hole learning about return oriented programming and finding this awesome seemingly open courseware class called CS 4630 Defense Against the Dark Arts [0], which eventually led to me signing up for this x86-64 assembly thing [1] when I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about by the third class. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cr4bd/4630/S2021/ https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cr4bd/4630/S2021/ [1] https://exercism.org/tracks/x86-64-assembly https://exercism.org/tracks/x86-64-assembly Update: Exercism seems to only be an "exercises" platform and doesn't actually have any teaching materials of its own?
    - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
      That is the greatest class name ever.
- mjul 4y ago
  It is a fascinating idea indeed. While Leibniz is widely known for his mathematics and philosophy, one of his lesser known ideas was the relation between law and computation. There is a small research community around it today. Look up Computational Law and Computational Contracts if you are interested.
WalterBright 4y ago
I attended a computing conference in LA a few years ago where someone presented a paper that turned legal phrases into code, and was able prove theorems from it. She suggested it was a way to mathematically look for "bugs" in the legal documents. I thought it was the most fascinating talk in the conference.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago
  do you have a link or reference to the paper or talk, please?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - btrettel 4y ago
    Possibly could be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshxZVMURt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshxZVMURt4 https://popl18.sigplan.org/details/POPL-2018-papers/3/Formal-Methods-and-the-Law https://popl18.sigplan.org/details/POPL-2018-papers/3/Formal... The city is Los Angeles, though the content doesn't seem to match precisely what was mentioned. I found this via a Google search for `conference convert legal phrases into code "theorem" bug`, which returned the following paper: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939v2/document https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939v2/document I then checked the citations of that paper for anything matching.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Yes, it's the POPL talk. Thanks for digging it up for me. I had a nice conversation with her after her talk about her work.
      - Twisol 4y ago
        I remember this talk! The speaker recommended doing this with the tax code because it was one of the most mechanical -- very little inherent ambiguity, there's just a lot of surface area to cover, so it's a great candidate for actually applying formal methods to.
btrettel 4y ago
I wrote an analyzer for patent claims: https://github.com/btrettel/plint https://github.com/btrettel/plint There are tons of ambiguities and other problems in issued patents! When I get the time, I intend to rewrite a significant amount of the code in an object-oriented style. (Basically, making a class for a patent claim and having a ton of methods for that.) The code right now is a mostly untested mess that seems to produce decent results but is not pleasant to work with.
sircastor 4y ago
Several years ago I was chatting with a patent lawyer who belonged to my electronics hobby group, and it struck me in the middle of the conversation that Lawyers are hackers of the Law. Folks who find the system interesting and (in some cases) enjoy finding and understanding the attack surface and vulnerabilities. I think the biggest difference they face is that the interpreter is another reasoning human, and not just a functional part of the machine.

by hrunt 4y ago

noman-land 4y ago

I have felt this way as well and wonder why we can't encode laws into some sort of machine code and study it, test it, iterate it, debug it, and optimize it like we do with computer programs.

rastamutta 4y ago
The space of things that can happen is just too large. You need a human, or some other neural network, to make judgment calls.
- noman-land 4y ago
  But perhaps we can study the past judgement calls and relate them to which words were chosen.
blep_ 4y ago
People tried that. Unfortunately, it was immediately doomed because it was a blockchain thing. More seriously, this means you also have to accurately encode all the things the laws refer to, even when those things are vague judgement calls. It's easy to say "you can only have a noncompete agreement if it doesn't make it unreasonably difficult to find another job in the same industry", but hard to express "unreasonably difficult" or "same industry" with the kind of precision we expect from code. A sufficiently evil company would just pay a lawyer for a few days to find a loophole in whatever definitions you can think of. There's a reason the primary use of this is cryptocurrency conversion - it's a lot easier to enumerate all the failure modes in "give me n of A and I will give you m of B".
JuettnerDistrib 4y ago
> encode laws into some sort of machine code Don't need to encode it in some sort of machine code. Just need a git repo with the law so we can submit a PR to the CA assembly and get this fixed.
jasonladuke0311 4y ago
Because it would end up a weird machine [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_machine
- noman-land 4y ago
  Thank you for this. I went down a 3 day rabbit hole learning about return oriented programming and finding this awesome seemingly open courseware class called CS 4630 Defense Against the Dark Arts [0], which eventually led to me signing up for this x86-64 assembly thing [1] when I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about by the third class. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cr4bd/4630/S2021/ https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cr4bd/4630/S2021/ [1] https://exercism.org/tracks/x86-64-assembly https://exercism.org/tracks/x86-64-assembly Update: Exercism seems to only be an "exercises" platform and doesn't actually have any teaching materials of its own?
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    That is the greatest class name ever.
mjul 4y ago
It is a fascinating idea indeed. While Leibniz is widely known for his mathematics and philosophy, one of his lesser known ideas was the relation between law and computation. There is a small research community around it today. Look up Computational Law and Computational Contracts if you are interested.

WalterBright 4y ago

I attended a computing conference in LA a few years ago where someone presented a paper that turned legal phrases into code, and was able prove theorems from it. She suggested it was a way to mathematically look for "bugs" in the legal documents. I thought it was the most fascinating talk in the conference.

chordalkeyboard 4y ago
do you have a link or reference to the paper or talk, please?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- btrettel 4y ago
  Possibly could be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshxZVMURt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshxZVMURt4 https://popl18.sigplan.org/details/POPL-2018-papers/3/Formal-Methods-and-the-Law https://popl18.sigplan.org/details/POPL-2018-papers/3/Formal... The city is Los Angeles, though the content doesn't seem to match precisely what was mentioned. I found this via a Google search for `conference convert legal phrases into code "theorem" bug`, which returned the following paper: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939v2/document https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939v2/document I then checked the citations of that paper for anything matching.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yes, it's the POPL talk. Thanks for digging it up for me. I had a nice conversation with her after her talk about her work.
    - Twisol 4y ago
      I remember this talk! The speaker recommended doing this with the tax code because it was one of the most mechanical -- very little inherent ambiguity, there's just a lot of surface area to cover, so it's a great candidate for actually applying formal methods to.

btrettel 4y ago

I wrote an analyzer for patent claims: https://github.com/btrettel/plint https://github.com/btrettel/plint There are tons of ambiguities and other problems in issued patents! When I get the time, I intend to rewrite a significant amount of the code in an object-oriented style. (Basically, making a class for a patent claim and having a ton of methods for that.) The code right now is a mostly untested mess that seems to produce decent results but is not pleasant to work with.

sircastor 4y ago

Several years ago I was chatting with a patent lawyer who belonged to my electronics hobby group, and it struck me in the middle of the conversation that Lawyers are hackers of the Law. Folks who find the system interesting and (in some cases) enjoy finding and understanding the attack surface and vulnerabilities. I think the biggest difference they face is that the interpreter is another reasoning human, and not just a functional part of the machine.