Hacking the Law

New submitter sethopia writes "Brooklyn Law School's Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP) hosted its first 'Legal Hackathon.' Instead of hacking computer code, attendees — mostly lawyers, law students, coders, and entrepreneurs — used the hacking ethos to devise technologically sophisticated solutions to legal problems. These included attempts to crowdsource mayoral candidacies in New York City and hacking model privacy policies for ISPs."

Comments

interestingly lawyers do this anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

computer programmers try to play by the rules: they read the manual and then try to follow what they've learned. Lawyers, meanwhile, are hacking the laws by default. They're always trying to get around following the manual.

Re:interestingly lawyers do this anyway

[speedplane]

The terms "and," "or," "may," and "shall" are relatively straightforward and do not receive much attention from lawyers. Terms like "reasonable," "harm," "intentional," and "negligent" tend to suck up much more of their time.

Re:SVN for law

[WrecklessSandwich]

Want to hack law ? Then start by by putting the entire code of law in an SVN-like system. Including proposed laws. With traceability of authors, who voted for them, etc... And an associated wiki for comments. And a complete list of cases that used them. This would be invaluable.

If we're going that route, the author/voting records should link to a database of campaign contributions as well.

Redundant?

[TFAFalcon]

Isn't hacking the law what lawyers do all the time? They study the law, find holes in it and exploit them.

Re:Old invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the problem is not so much lack of hacking, but lack of proper code review.

Polishing a turd

[Hentes]

The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.

Re:Polishing a turd

[ibwolf]

The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.

Yes, because - as every software developer know firsthand - when you throw out an old crufty system and develop a brand, sparkling, new one in its place it is always a smooth process that provides tremendous benefits

</sarcasm>

Re:Polishing a turd

[Anonymous Coward]

And may I propose that in the new system, the *intent* of the rules should be documented alongside the rules, to prevent the system from being abused.

Example - instead of stating "Bicycles should be equipped with lights" a rule could state "Bicyclists are hard to see in the dark. To prevent bicyclists from getting hurt or killed due to being poorly visible, bicycles should be equipped with lights ".

Let's say someone is dressed up in bright, glow-in-the-dark clothing but is riding a bike without light. Or on a perfectly lit, quiet road, at 3am. By the intent of the rule, there's no issue; there is no risk of him getting killed due to being "poorly visible". But leave out the intent, and you go down the slippery slope of permitting corrupt cops to stop, fine, and detain a person - and if he resists arrest, tase him into oblivion and possibly kill him, ironically as a result of a rule that was created to PROTECT said person in the first place. The law should have enough power, but not too much.

Likewise, adding the intent of rules in the law would also prevent the rules from being abused by mega-corporations. No more "hidden agenda" saying one thing but doing another.

Re:Polishing a turd

[mhajicek]

Actually it is. It just runs on a biological multi-core system.

Re:SVN for law

[Another, completely]

But individual lawyers and legal secretaries could make this database their full-time job, in which case it wouldn't be a conflict for them any more. There is already an industry publishing books that list references from the law to cases where it was applied. This would be a natural extension, wouldn't it?

Re:SVN for law

[arglebargle_xiv]

Rather than a version control system, I think it would be more useful to put the law into a requirements management system (after all, what is the law but a set of requirements?) That *might* help lawmakers to see if they are complete (cover what is intended to be covered), consistent and measurable.

If you try and push this, you'll run into serious real-world acceptance problems. In some cases the law is deliberately obtuse, obscure, open to misinterpretation, and so on. It's this way by design, because two various groups couldn't agree on any wording, or they were under pressure to create a law that violates the laws of physics but managed to word it in such a way that it may not, or it's meant to be interpreted in a way that's more or less the opposite of what it says, or a thousand other reasons. The law is not a Turing machine, and never will be. The last thing most politicians or lawyers would want is a comprehensive overview system of the kind that's being proposed in the above posts.

Re:do it in python

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the important part:

if plaintiff.amount_paid() > accused.amount_paid():
  winner = plaintiff;
else:
  winner = accused

Re:SVN for law

[TheDarkMaster]

Exact. In short, many laws are broken by design.