That's why I figure formalization should be relatively straightforward. The PDF someone linked to about a Prolog-based formalization of UK citizenship legislation is a perfect example.
Code should be executable, queryable, checkable, and so on. Legal code translated into a logical skeleton would obviously be more amenable to visualization and other interesting things. Then everyone wouldn't have to learn the language; we could develop tools for people to query the data at different levels of sophistication.
I would love to see people trying to create these sorts of representations.
But I suspect we're decades away from actually making the shift you want in the primary documents. Computer languages are made to be executed by computers. But the execution medium for human laws is human minds. And most of the relevant human minds have law degrees. So a computer-friendly translation of laws will be always be extra work until the execution medium changes.
Machine translation is making great progress, though, so perhaps we can automate away the problem.
Code should be executable, queryable, checkable, and so on. Legal code translated into a logical skeleton would obviously be more amenable to visualization and other interesting things. Then everyone wouldn't have to learn the language; we could develop tools for people to query the data at different levels of sophistication.