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.
If law code is a repository: 1. Each trial should be encoded into a law. 2. If the trial is already covered sufficiently in the codebase, and both parties agree to it result. Then case is solved. 3. If not, the new judgement leads to a "pull request" into the codebase.
In the end it reminds me of a quote by Edmund Burke: "Bad men obey the law only out of fear of punishment; good men obey it out of conscience - and thus good men are often restrained by it, while bad men find ways around it."
Jokes aside, I'm trying to imagine what a pull request workflow would be for law making.
For example, there might be a test that checks that a law has adequate budget before applying it; or to get an error if it conflicts with another law.
Also (Italian here), I would be very happy to do "git blame" and discover who actually introduced a modification.
Can anyone explain why it's believed this "would make no sense"?
1. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059899) - May 2021 (126 comments) 2. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633122) - Sept 2021 (40 comments) 3. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546874) - Sept 2023 (277 comments)
scope QualifiedEmployeeDiscount :
definition qualified_employee_discount
under condition is_property consequence
equals
if employee_discount >=
customer_price \* gross_profit_percentage
then customer_price \* gross_profit_percentage
else employee_discount
It feels like the best of both worlds, a syntax that is new and strange to use while basically being the same old abc If Else programming language.Not sure I'm seeing any law-specific features either. Maybe if there were some tokens like 'jurisdiction' or 'jurisprudence', but it seems like yet another programming language.
Is there any money to be made with this yet? (Jobs, Contracting, Projects, etc)
If not: What's the plan to get this to be used?