On Building Git for Lawyers

I was thinking about that last month. But in addition to git, I would propose a formal verification system based on the contract statements, to ensure that any addition would not broke the logic and correctness of the contract. Working like a CI system.

Then why not write the contracts in prolog?

Right? Or a domain specific language for law: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala

I get that dislodging docx is an impossible job, but since docx is a terrible format for anything, it needs to be done for all the reasons the author mentions. The codes that run society should not be locked up in bad proprietary formats.

The complexity and risk of doing this would be astronomical and beyond the scope of anyone other than a highly-funded international working group with expertise in law and symbolic logic. It would take them decades to complete this, and in the meantime, the legal world would've left them behind.

Inherent in contracts are so many assumptions based on historical precedent, hacks to work around vagueness, etc. that to achieve this would require a rewrite of global legal systems, including centuries of case law.

Even getting a lawyer to change one word of a contract clause that's been in use for decades is a challenge (because to change anything would be to erase all known jurisprudence about that clause's interpretation, creating risk where formerly there was none).

But to upend the entire legal system to make contracts verifiable (which they could never be anyway thanks to the imprecision of human language) would be herculean.

EDIT: For example, consider the phrase "best effort." If you had to express that logically in order to make it verifiable, you'd have so much expensive negotiation about what "best effort" actually means. Presently, it's determined by a jury if there's a lawsuit in the future, where the jury relies on their own personal experience and expert testimony about the standard practices in that specific field.

> The codes that run society

This discussion is about contracts, not legal codes. I agree with your statement, but decades now of people on Slashdot being unable to differentiate copyright and patent has made me this way, where anyone potentially mixing up legal concepts has me triggered and jumping down their throat.

Even if you did, the result would almost certainly be a fairly expressive formal system. Deciding equivalence of some change would be undecidable and enumerating the "interesting" differences between changes would be impossible in practice.

Contracts do run society, along with legal codes that are written in much the same manner, by the same body of experts.

This is not how common law (and likely other) legal systems work. You'd likely have better results with some kind of AI that has ingested all of case law.

Moreover, the law literally says that contracts are considered as laws but only applicable to co-contractants (at least in France it's written like that). So it's the same thing, just with a different scope and precedence on the hierarchy of norms.