Strangely enough, we've ignored that "find-and-replace across the body of law" in the past. Even the new gender laws ignore existing laws. I sometimes wish that we had written a compiler for law. And a statically typed language designed for compiling policy (think Rego + Rust). Politicians and Law makers would have to test their new proposals in code before wasting anyone else's time on it. Lawyers would have to learn the language and compiler tools as part of their study, but anyone in the country would have access to them so that they could run their own tests and even settle minor legal disputes without having to pay lawyers. New laws that cause compiler errors don't get through, unless you can first unblock them with a refactor (which must also compile without errors). I think it's obvious that an attempt to encode the current statue book would fail miserably. You might have to start off an extremely simplistic set of rules (kinda like RocoCop's prime directives or Moses' 10 commandments) because I think we can all generally agree that killing is wrong generally. Ok, add a law "thou shake not kill". Oh, but what if someone's trying to kill you or your child? "Killing is wrong unless X is true". At the very least it would be an interesting exercise.
> Politicians and Law makers would have to test their new proposals in code before wasting anyone else's time on it
I look forward to when code can express the richness of natural languages. In the meantime, formally-declared law is a fantasy. (Exhibit A: any court opinion.)
> You might have to start off an extremely simplistic set of rules (kinda like RocoCop's prime directives or Moses' 10 commandments)
Every civilisation has a leader who thought they could reïnvent law from first principles. Nobody uses their systems. (Legal axioms ultimately track to time immemorial, i.e.g prehistory.)
> Killing is wrong unless X is true
Murder vs manslaugher vs self defence vs execution vs being stabbed by a soldier is a good lens into law. (Or, to be provocative, eating meat.)
> it would be an interesting exercise
It's a popular in laws school. In its failure one learns of the intersection between culture and the law and why VHS beat Betamax.
lol, you picked out my "Killing is wrong unless X is true" quote but ignored my follow up which acknowledges that prime directives are insufficiently flexible. I'm not even suggesting starting off a legal system from scratch. I'm saying that it would be good to begin by encoding our current system into a purpose-built language and compiler, and of course one should start with the basics and build upon it, using the language and compiler to find inconsistencies, clashes etc.
I think your point may be that laws currently do have nuance (eg murder vs manslaughter vs...) which is all fine. By all means load those rules into the system too, but the point of the language and compiler is that while you're doing this you pay attention to compiler errors along the way and at least be aware when a change (to a rule, or the meaning of a term or type) caused some other change that you didn't expect. Eg: changing the meaning of a word here makes one law ambiguous and causes these two to clash.
Using it in law school is a great idea. It's where it should begin.
> these are all interpretations of the same type of event
Sure. But legally--and culturally--very different. If someone doesn't see that, they probably shouldn't be commenting on the law. (Practically speaking, they probably aren't.)
Right. We are talking about social conventions, not right or wrong. This is plain when we see that the same action can be legal in one country, and a serious crime in another. It's simply the rules of the game, no different to Scrabble or poker. How the individual engages with the culture/game is their business. Similarly, if an individual is able to direct the creation of rules in their favour, why shouldn't they?
> Social constructs are socially constructed. Given social systems are heterogenous, this variation is far from profound. (It’s almost corollary.)
Not really. I imagine its fine to shoot a burglar in the US who breaks in your house, but you could go to jail for murder in the UK. Soldiers can kill civilians without consequences. So can governments (death row, in the US).
>> if an individual is able to direct the creation of rules in their favour, why shouldn't they?
> One usually can’t.
I think most(/all?) law is created this way. Eg a pretty small collection of individuals that have the sway in a corporation use the corporation to pay lobbyists to draft laws to benefit them (creating a moat, force individuals to pay (health insurance), etc, etc). This is done in the name of serving the public interest. The political class then rubber stamps these proposals, in order to receive a seat on the board on retiring from politics.
Your mistake here, imo, is that you think law is something other than an instrument of control. You believe that it is about codifying a set of good behaviours or something. The compilation errors are intentional, rich people are able to get the coder/solicitor to express the law in terms they want. The reality is that anything written down is a metaphor for the internal moral awareness of right and wrong, and as such can be subverted. We are each able to work out right from wrong, but if we believe we have to defer to a law book, we externalise our personal authority to a book.
I think that corporations' leadership (and anyone that aided in the process) not being held criminally accountable, not being stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and not having to pay reparations for the damages they caused is a very serious bug.
