Catala – Law to Code

Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development.

There are judges and politicians in the US that advocate for various "interpretations" of laws including parts of the constitution, which are different from what the law literally says. In fact they refer to the literal meaning as the "literal interpretation", implying it is one of many valid interpretations, and casting doubt on the idea of language having a precise meaning. The crowd here knows that it is totally possible and often invaluable to work in languages with precise meaning. Anyways, in practice this means: all the steps happened for the law to get passed by the legislature including arguing about the exact text, and instead of enforcing it as written, the judiciary enforces some slightly different but similar law.

A technology like this necessarily concentrates power in the legislature, and takes it away from the judicial system. It concentrates legal power at write time and removes it from run/read time.

> "interpretations"... which are different from what the law literally says.

We have to remember that the letter and spirit of the law can grow apart over time, and loopholes are often gamed before that naturally happens anyway. So obviously we still need judges to keep the "spiritual" aspect of intent alive, so that evil isn't laundered through technicality.

"Literal" should really be a concrete thing, but it does feel strangely connected to a problem that has existed since Sola Scriptura, up to Gödel's theorem. I think about this everytime software and law collide. That article on "what color are your bits"[1] also comes to mind.

[1]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23