> There is a sense - engineer's disease - that laws can made better by formal specification, but I've learned that is naive. We can call it Bentham's disease,

> There is a sense - engineer's disease - that laws can made better by formal specification, but I've learned that is naive. We can call it Bentham's disease, and it's what gave everybody civil law outside of the systems descended from the Napoleonic Code (another civil law system.) It's naïve to pretend it's something that can be done in an afternoon, but not to think that it's the ideal we should always be aspiring to. Henry M. Robert, the creator of Robert's Rules of order, was an engineer, not a lawyer. He took Thomas Jefferson's summary and reorganization of English Parliamentary tradition and precedent, extracted the implicit premises from it, then reconstructed a system for deliberative societies from first principles. We use his system now. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dudley_Field_II also: "Formalizing Robert's Rules of Order: An Experiment in Automating Mediation of Group Decision Making" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/869694