Legal docs should be written like code. | Hacker News Reader

Legal docs should be written like code.

10 pointsbrianl8 comments

I've been getting a bit crossed eyed reading a bunch of crap legal documents. I now recognize patters and see that words, phrases, and structure have specific meanings. A lot of that are definition statements and conditional constructs.

Now I see lawyers as programmers who write really crappy code with an ancient language and grammer.

It would make a lot of sense to modernize their tool set and structure their documents like well written code.

"Your honor, the defendant violated the contract on line 325 by failing to perform the 3rd AND condition."

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I've often been glad I'm not a lawyer. Could you imagine writing code (a contract) that you can't test before putting into production, and running it on a processor (Judge) that would execute it inconsistently from every other processor?

You could always have your own internal "compiler" which will translate from this language to your "machine" code. Similar alternative would be to express the flow of the document in Lisp/Scheme. That way you can quickly spot bugs in the document.

Humans are much more complicated.

They are doing something like this for accounting and financial information via XBRL.

man, I have been thinking this for years. If ilaws were written in code there would be no reason to have judges or lawyers. We have those only because spoken language is ambiguous and open to interpretation.

It's not that easy though, for example, Jacobellis v. Ohio - how would you go about defining the threshold of pornography?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Great point. Your question reminded me of the scene from Aviator: "Dr. Branson is a mathematician of some note...yes. And he will prove that, in fact, Ms. Russell's mammaries are no more prominant than any of these other fine ladies. Doctor? Doctor... you forgot your calipers."

that's my point. If something can't be specified unambiguously in code, it shouldn't be in a law. Whether the verdict is innocent or guilty shouldn't rest on who happens to be sitting on the bench that day.

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