6 ms·

Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/ https://donotpay.com/

by pmarca 6y ago

dodobirdlord 6y ago
No, law is not code and it’s very important that it’s not code. Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great. When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.
- pmarca 6y ago
  Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?
  - atoav 6y ago
    Yes
  - 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
    Sure, but is immutability more important in law or in code? Updating a smart contract seems to be as tedious as changing a law.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    The key part is that the court system can correct for a bug before the law itself is changed; it's a way to fix things as the code is being executed for a particular case, before the developers have even identified how/if the bug applies for other cases and figured out a general fix, much less implemented one.
  - jka 6y ago
    In each case it may depend upon the 'application'. For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early. Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues. All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.
  - mengwong 6y ago
    Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this debate into new territory. (TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open-source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.) Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should-know-about-rules-as-code/ https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should... The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court". How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin... Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def... There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha... Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517 Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch-perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versions.html?docId=66957 https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versi... Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github. I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open-standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app. Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is not the customer -- as Atrium proved, expensively. To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! <3) to hire people to make it happen. https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singaporean-startup-partners-with-singapore-management-university-to-make-computational-law-a-reality-software-is-eating-law/ https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singapo... (Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?lang=en https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?... If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: https://computational.law/hiring https://computational.law/hiring
- drewbug 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language :)
- mdonahoe 6y ago
  “Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great.” I’m not sure it is always great. Studies show racism[1] and hunger[2] and can impact sentencing judgments. > When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected. How is that different than software? 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-break https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...
- aantthony 6y ago
  Law should be objectively decidable. Thousands upon thousands of pages of enigmatic legalistic nonsense make it impossible to predict a legal decision. When there is this much law, it becomes a paradox where the result is actually lawless - it becomes the whim of a judge's interpretation.
hluska 6y ago
I’m a big fan of anything that will bring effective legal access to everyone. Technology will definitely play a role, but so will legal deregulation. Lots of jurisdictions are experimenting with opening up certain areas of legal practice to people who aren’t lawyers. And they’re rebuilding systems (alongside technology) to make them easier to access without attorneys. The troubling part is that at some point, we need to tackle electoral reform. Even if we tackle the legal system and provide effective legal access to everyone, we’ll still be a long ways from tackling mass disillusionment. Hell, in lots of cases, disillusionment and/or disenfranchisement are logical results of history! Anyways, good comment!
vinay_ys 6y ago
It seems donotpay can get you into a legal engagement easily, but the other party can tie you up in more legal battles that donotpay doesn't yet handle and then you are screwed if you can't hire and pay expensive lawyers.
CommonAccord 6y ago
A piece of this is to eliminate the friction of legal text by open sourcing legal templates, in a graph, on GitHub. The key word here is "source." Legal documents currently are blobs, not source. See github.com/CommonAccord/ Lots of exampless, including the YC SAFES, Series Seed, GA4GH data sharing, etc. It's not full algorithmic, but compatible with algorithmic approaches, like Mike Genesereth's and Meng's.

Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/ https://donotpay.com/

by pmarca 6y ago

Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/ https://donotpay.com/

dodobirdlord 6y ago

No, law is not code and it’s very important that it’s not code. Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great. When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

pmarca 6y ago
Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?
- atoav 6y ago
  Yes
- 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
  Sure, but is immutability more important in law or in code? Updating a smart contract seems to be as tedious as changing a law.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  The key part is that the court system can correct for a bug before the law itself is changed; it's a way to fix things as the code is being executed for a particular case, before the developers have even identified how/if the bug applies for other cases and figured out a general fix, much less implemented one.
- jka 6y ago
  In each case it may depend upon the 'application'. For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early. Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues. All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.
- mengwong 6y ago
  Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this debate into new territory. (TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open-source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.) Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should-know-about-rules-as-code/ https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should... The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court". How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin... Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def... There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha... Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517 Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch-perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versions.html?docId=66957 https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versi... Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github. I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open-standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app. Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is not the customer -- as Atrium proved, expensively. To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! <3) to hire people to make it happen. https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singaporean-startup-partners-with-singapore-management-university-to-make-computational-law-a-reality-software-is-eating-law/ https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singapo... (Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?lang=en https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?... If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: https://computational.law/hiring https://computational.law/hiring
drewbug 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language :)
mdonahoe 6y ago
“Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great.” I’m not sure it is always great. Studies show racism[1] and hunger[2] and can impact sentencing judgments. > When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected. How is that different than software? 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-break https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...
aantthony 6y ago
Law should be objectively decidable. Thousands upon thousands of pages of enigmatic legalistic nonsense make it impossible to predict a legal decision. When there is this much law, it becomes a paradox where the result is actually lawless - it becomes the whim of a judge's interpretation.

hluska 6y ago

I’m a big fan of anything that will bring effective legal access to everyone. Technology will definitely play a role, but so will legal deregulation. Lots of jurisdictions are experimenting with opening up certain areas of legal practice to people who aren’t lawyers. And they’re rebuilding systems (alongside technology) to make them easier to access without attorneys. The troubling part is that at some point, we need to tackle electoral reform. Even if we tackle the legal system and provide effective legal access to everyone, we’ll still be a long ways from tackling mass disillusionment. Hell, in lots of cases, disillusionment and/or disenfranchisement are logical results of history! Anyways, good comment!

vinay_ys 6y ago

It seems donotpay can get you into a legal engagement easily, but the other party can tie you up in more legal battles that donotpay doesn't yet handle and then you are screwed if you can't hire and pay expensive lawyers.

CommonAccord 6y ago

A piece of this is to eliminate the friction of legal text by open sourcing legal templates, in a graph, on GitHub. The key word here is "source." Legal documents currently are blobs, not source. See github.com/CommonAccord/ Lots of exampless, including the YC SAFES, Series Seed, GA4GH data sharing, etc. It's not full algorithmic, but compatible with algorithmic approaches, like Mike Genesereth's and Meng's.