

Legal docs should be written like code. - brianl

I've been getting a bit crossed eyed reading a bunch of crap legal documents. I now recognize patters and see that words, phrases, and structure have specific meanings. A lot of that are definition statements and conditional constructs.<p>Now I see lawyers as programmers who write really crappy code with an ancient language and grammer.<p>It would make a lot of sense to modernize their tool set and structure their documents like well written code.<p>"Your honor, the defendant violated the contract on line 325 by failing to perform the 3rd AND condition."
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mark-r
I've often been glad I'm not a lawyer. Could you imagine writing code (a
contract) that you can't test before putting into production, and running it
on a processor (Judge) that would execute it inconsistently from every other
processor?

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ubasu
You could always have your own internal "compiler" which will translate from
this language to your "machine" code. Similar alternative would be to express
the flow of the document in Lisp/Scheme. That way you can quickly spot bugs in
the document.

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Andrew_Quentin
Humans are much more complicated.

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mattee
They are doing something like this for accounting and financial information
via XBRL.

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badkins
man, I have been thinking this for years. If ilaws were written in code there
would be no reason to have judges or lawyers. We have those only because
spoken language is ambiguous and open to interpretation.

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mrduncan
It's not that easy though, for example, Jacobellis v. Ohio - how would you go
about defining the threshold of pornography?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

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brianl
Great point. Your question reminded me of the scene from Aviator: "Dr. Branson
is a mathematician of some note...yes. And he will prove that, in fact, Ms.
Russell's mammaries are no more prominant than any of these other fine ladies.
Doctor? Doctor... you forgot your calipers."

