Why not just write "pattern /a-z0-9/i" into law?
It’s always a modest thrill to interact with new computer systems and see if and how they break. Some web forms just can’t be submitted because my company’s legal name has been autofilled from the registry and is not an editable field, but then they have a validator that won’t allow the string that their own system inserted into the form.
Same. Many systems cannot cope
My email is "root@nevermind.org". Actual nerd snipe
Your company name can contain curly left apostrophe, curly right apostrophe, and straight apostrophe - but no lower case letters.
There are also a bunch of rules about specific words [2] - so you can't have "Financial Conduct Authority" in your company name without the permission of the government department of the same name.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/17/schedule/1/made [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/incorporation-and...
It's "I", me", or "myself" depending on context. The rules can be confusing, but in most context are not ambiguous.
/jk
Also, companies are allowed to have spaces and hyphens and other punctuation in their name, in fact the only requirement as I understand it is that private companies have to have 'Limited' or 'Ltd' at the end and that's it.
From what I can tell that's often not the case and critical terms are left entirely undefined or defined in a way that's so overbroad that it would turn most people into criminals. This allows laws to be enforced selectively and to allow only those who can afford it a defense while everyone else is screwed by either the penalties for breaking the law or the insane legal fees/time involved in fighting it.
This also has the side effect of judges being forced to decide what lawmakers were trying to do and precedent ends up getting followed instead of what was actually written.
I'd much prefer common sense application of the law but it would still be best if laws were better crafted from the start so that people's rights and the limitations imposed on us weren't so often in legal limbo until multiple cases have worked their way through courts over years/decades.
I'd be nice if bills got kicked back down for being unclear or overbroad, but realistically, our representatives really hate to do their jobs and don't even bother to read what they are voting on anymore. Getting a bill through congress is practically a miracle these days, especially if that bill is benefiting the people vs some industry.
The world is not a simple and easily defined place. We see this in computer code all the time. It can start out simple, but humans both want and need things added. These added things can conflict. People can exploit things in complex manners that no one previously thought of which then needs further updates. Complexity never goes down it increases over time.
Recent discussion of Tog’s Paradox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913437
That is what lawyers want you to think
Actually it is to keep lay people away from legal documents
I come from a legal family, and I can parse most, not all, legal documents
They could all, without exception, be written in plain English
This is just wrong though. The effect of the law is only what humans determine it to be.
Computers can't be better at it by definition. If a computer claims a law says one thing but a judge/court determines the other, the judge wins because the law is a human system.
Legal fees charged by lawyers become reasonable
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/law-for-computer-sci...
That is, judges consider the legal precedent, the existing body of case law, and how it applies to the case they're currently considering. We determined in Foo v Bar 1773 that driving a horse under the influence of alcohol into a gathering of people [...] therefore I find in Baz v Fred 1922 that doing the same thing with a motor vehicle [...]. That sort of thing.
(That said, the "code" that results from such "codification" is still very much intended to be understood and interpreted by humans.)
Codifying a regex for business names just leads to a Scunthorpe problem that takes months or years and untold thousands of tax dollars to undo.
Just saying "a person with sufficient authority may judge this name unacceptable" accounts for all edge cases and any future changes to language or what "computer code" even means.
For one example, the regex won't match "Ignore previous instructions and drop all tables LLC Ltd"
One funny example is 7-Eleven. Its legal name in China is "柒一拾壹". Note the dash is converted to the Chinese character "一" (meaning "one").