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For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all th

For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I believe it would greatly improve everyone's ability to read laws and be confident about their understanding of them, which would be a huge boon for society.

swayvil 3y ago
And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite educational.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Am actually working on a project like this. Not quite to the level of insanity you're thinking about, but certainly a couple of thousand years.
- willsoon 3y ago
  [dead]
- jll29 3y ago
  Former R&D director of legaltech company here. Lawyers already use tools that link everything. For instance in the U.S., the Westlaw search engine for legal cases is such a tool, it can parse legal citations and turns them into hyperlinks. It rankes cases given a query based on a state-of-the art machine learning based IR method, and it is aware of cases in the ranking that are currently overturned by higher courts (shown as red flags) or being reviewed (shown as yellow flags). The software can also predict the outcome of a legal case and recommend courses of action that makes winning more likely. It includes ruling statistics about all sitting judges. Curiously, lawyers like to see the world as static, they do not like e.g. search results to differ between sessions, but of course cases get decided dynamically every day, which must necessarily also change the search results for any given query. If people want to see what is the state of the art in AI and the law, I recommend you have a look at "AI & the Law" (ICAIL, the annual conference and the journal of the same name).
bg46z 3y ago
Although in principle I agree with you, the law generally depends too much on interpretation and precedent to be expressed and understood like you’re hoping for.
- jeppester 3y ago
  That information should be available in summarized anonymized form, referenced from the law language. The judiciary should keep it up-to-date.
tsimionescu 3y ago
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to other laws and regulations and legal precedent etc.
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  I think this is a big part of it. My sense (as a non-lawyer who has looked at a fair number of laws and contracts) is that, in addition, there are plenty of laws and contracts that are just poorly written and wording or constructions that lawyers have retained out of caution or traditionalism. This last case, traditionalism and caution, is maybe a special case of the other cases, but it's not always obvious.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I believe that another thing that happens, and it is common in every field, is that certain constructions are very common within the field, and so the need arises among practitioners to shorten them. Most domains invent new words, but this doesn't work for laws and contracts (since they need to at least in principle be understandable to non-practitioners, such as most elected officials). So instead of full-on jargon, legal texts get enshrined phrases, which practitioners can essentially skip over, but which also retain some meaning in plain English (though often sounding antiquated).
  - pydry 3y ago
    I worked for a company that translated certain kinds of legal contract into what was effectively a DSL. They could then be represented in a simplified way. That was the whole business. The CEO (a lawyer) claimed that the lawyers who wrote these things would deliberately and unnecesarily overcomplicate them so that they could maximize billable hours. I think they could quite easily have been templated using a DSL but that DSL would need frequent maintenance. These types of contracts did evolve as new types of clauses and legal constructs popped up and gradually evolved from "new" to "standard" to "boilerplate".
hyperthesis 3y ago
A big problem is you lose all the case law that interprets the law. Like discarding two centuries of bug reports and patches. At the same time, laws have been codified (i.e. the case law rewritten coherently, combining all the patches combined), such as the Uniform Commercial Code.
willsoon 3y ago
[dead]

swayvil 3y ago

And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite educational.

qingcharles 3y ago
Am actually working on a project like this. Not quite to the level of insanity you're thinking about, but certainly a couple of thousand years.
willsoon 3y ago
[dead]
jll29 3y ago
Former R&D director of legaltech company here. Lawyers already use tools that link everything. For instance in the U.S., the Westlaw search engine for legal cases is such a tool, it can parse legal citations and turns them into hyperlinks. It rankes cases given a query based on a state-of-the art machine learning based IR method, and it is aware of cases in the ranking that are currently overturned by higher courts (shown as red flags) or being reviewed (shown as yellow flags). The software can also predict the outcome of a legal case and recommend courses of action that makes winning more likely. It includes ruling statistics about all sitting judges. Curiously, lawyers like to see the world as static, they do not like e.g. search results to differ between sessions, but of course cases get decided dynamically every day, which must necessarily also change the search results for any given query. If people want to see what is the state of the art in AI and the law, I recommend you have a look at "AI & the Law" (ICAIL, the annual conference and the journal of the same name).

bg46z 3y ago

Although in principle I agree with you, the law generally depends too much on interpretation and precedent to be expressed and understood like you’re hoping for.

jeppester 3y ago
That information should be available in summarized anonymized form, referenced from the law language. The judiciary should keep it up-to-date.

tsimionescu 3y ago

This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to other laws and regulations and legal precedent etc.

actuallyalys 3y ago
I think this is a big part of it. My sense (as a non-lawyer who has looked at a fair number of laws and contracts) is that, in addition, there are plenty of laws and contracts that are just poorly written and wording or constructions that lawyers have retained out of caution or traditionalism. This last case, traditionalism and caution, is maybe a special case of the other cases, but it's not always obvious.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I believe that another thing that happens, and it is common in every field, is that certain constructions are very common within the field, and so the need arises among practitioners to shorten them. Most domains invent new words, but this doesn't work for laws and contracts (since they need to at least in principle be understandable to non-practitioners, such as most elected officials). So instead of full-on jargon, legal texts get enshrined phrases, which practitioners can essentially skip over, but which also retain some meaning in plain English (though often sounding antiquated).
- pydry 3y ago
  I worked for a company that translated certain kinds of legal contract into what was effectively a DSL. They could then be represented in a simplified way. That was the whole business. The CEO (a lawyer) claimed that the lawyers who wrote these things would deliberately and unnecesarily overcomplicate them so that they could maximize billable hours. I think they could quite easily have been templated using a DSL but that DSL would need frequent maintenance. These types of contracts did evolve as new types of clauses and legal constructs popped up and gradually evolved from "new" to "standard" to "boilerplate".

hyperthesis 3y ago

A big problem is you lose all the case law that interprets the law. Like discarding two centuries of bug reports and patches. At the same time, laws have been codified (i.e. the case law rewritten coherently, combining all the patches combined), such as the Uniform Commercial Code.

willsoon 3y ago

[dead]