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Ask HN: Can you compile laws?

• philipov 11y ago
  Laws are not similar to code. Laws are abstract and their implementation requires non-deterministic judgement and interpretation, which is why we have judges. They are the terrain of the game through which the modern trial-by-(lawyerly)-combat is performed. That game more closely resembles Mao than it does Go.
• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Making the assumption that laws are like code with strictly defined execution paths makes you lose out on jury nullification, among other benefits.
• vmorgulis 11y ago
  You can play with Prolog or rule-based programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule-based_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule-based_system For some laws, it should be possible to detect flaws or inconsistencies.
  • spyros 11y ago
    Flaws and inconsistencies are usually introduced with negation. A very neat theory for negation in first-order rule-based systems called "Well-Founded Semantics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-founded_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-founded_semantics) has the "side-effect" of assigning the "undefined" logical value to propositions that can't be proven true or false in a well-founded manner (think Russel and his barber). People have experimented with Prolog, the Well-Founded Semantics and rules used to infer information about mental disorders (http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm) in exactly the context mentioned here. Maybe unsurprisingly, some of those rules were found to be...unfounded (pun intended) :)
• pjungwir 11y ago
  Aristotle wrote that laws are for the general case and judges for the specific. In other words, they are guidelines but you want a human to interpret them and apply them to a concrete situation. Hence "hard cases make bad law." And just the other day someone here was asking about the value of reading the Classics. :-)
• chudi 11y ago
  there is some research in this field from members of my faculty check this links to get started: https://scholar.google.com.ar/scholar?safe=off&es_sm=122&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.&bvm=bv.96783405,d.cWw&biw=1600&bih=809&um=1&ie=UTF-8&lr&cites=10072386619481769293 https://scholar.google.com.ar/scholar?safe=off&es_sm=122&bav... http://ed.fbk.eu/people/sisai/home/publications_files/pdf/cl.pdf http://ed.fbk.eu/people/sisai/home/publications_files/pdf/cl...
• brudgers 11y ago
  The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes,_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes,_Jr.
• gregjarm 11y ago
  https://www.judicata.com/ https://www.judicata.com/ is less compiling code and more pattern recognition and mapping, like a genome.
• avmich 11y ago
  While laws can be seen as more complex than some simple - straightforward, deterministic - logic of a program, modern programming evolve fast to include more complex models. Advancements of machine learning, applications of Bayesian networks can produce programs with outputs similar to applications of laws. Laws themselves - by their nature - have to have an abstract element in them and a degree of generality, which makes them similar to computer code. It is those other features of laws which represent difficulties - from a programmer standpoint - which are left to be modeled with enough accuracy to be useful.