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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

I partly like this idea in theory, but believe it is literally 100% impossible to come up with a better "test suite" than "the actual court system?"

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The courts have to evaluate what they think the law's drafters meant: Yeah, it says this, but it's obvious the legislators didn't mean for it to be read that way. It'd be nice if there were footnotes that expounded on what the authors were trying to accomplish to help courts interpret the laws.

At least in the US, it's not the drafters' intent that matters, but the intent of the legislators who voted on it. (Legislators actually have lawmaking power. Drafters are usually unelected staff or even lobbyists.)

When a statute is ambiguous, courts do sometimes look at the congressional record (eg floor debates) to determine intent.

To add on that, there are several competing theories of statutory interpretation in US legal thought. It's a very complex subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation#Sta...

I don't want me or my male family members to be labelled sex-offenders whilst you "test" the "court system" to see if the laws work as intended. All because some overzealous prosecutor wanted to be "tough" on "toxic masculinity".

Oh, I mean, Black man here -- I 100% agree with you that there are serious and deep problems with how things are done now; I just have very little faith that any hypothetical nerd testing like we're talking about here will do much better.

If it was 'literally 100% impossible', you wouldn't need to believe it, you'd know it to be so.

As for test suites and courts - the two are complementary so there's need to compare them to one another.

Yeah, there’s no way that a modern computer could outdo the logical accuracy and processing power of our 300 year old legal system. Court rooms and arguing and paperwork, much more efficient than silicon.

With developments in AI I doubt that will stand the test of time.

Courts and lawyers are efficient at generating large pay checks for lawyers.

They are horrible at everything else.

Trying to measure it for "logical accuracy" and using ideas like "processing power" so very deeply demonstrates how little you understand what actually is happening.

You have a bunch of judges, none of which are immune to racism and corruption, giving out their version of the law from big oak benches while a suspect is held against their will in jail for however long. I think a computer can do better.

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