←back to thread

Catala – Law to Code

(catala-lang.org)
116 points Grognak | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
alphazard ◴[] No.46178933[source]
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.

replies(6): >>46179013 #>>46179227 #>>46179247 #>>46179427 #>>46179579 #>>46191682 #
1. csb6 ◴[] No.46179579[source]
Catala is specifically for tax codes and other laws that involve formulas and calculations, not all laws, so I don’t think most of your concerns apply to it specifically. There are often complicated rules governing how, e.g. benefits or tax credits are calculated that natural language is clumsy at expressing, so having a formal language that encodes that logic seems useful.

I agree government/justice by algorithm would be very dangerous, but Catala does not seem to be that.