Hacking the Law

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Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @09:08PM from the there's-an-arduino-for-that dept.

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."

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SVN for law by dargaud · 2012-04-24 21:20 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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1. Re:SVN for law by jimshatt · 2012-04-24 21:28 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Can't wait to use 'svn blame'...
2. Re:SVN for law by ComaVN · 2012-04-24 21:31 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Somalia does this, except they use git.
  
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  Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
3. Re:SVN for law by WrecklessSandwich · 2012-04-24 21:40 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
4. Re:SVN for law by digitig · 2012-04-24 21:52 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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. I don't know of any open source requirements management tools though -- at least, not ones that are still maintained. Perhaps requirements management goes against the hacker ethos (which would reduce the open source effort put into such things, although it wouldn't eliminate it completely of course). If requirements management is against the hacker ethos then I suspect that attempts to hack the law won't work very well.
  
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  Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
5. Re:SVN for law by fph+il+quozientatore · 2012-04-24 22:44 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  In most countries without common law (I can speak first-hand about Italy and Germany), the laws are an unholy mess, impossible to read, search, and interpret; in most cases you have no hope other than asking a consult to a lawyer.
  You want the same people that spent at least 5 years studying this crap and make their living out of it to work actively to simplify it. It is a great idea, but I do not have any hope of seeing this applied.
  Shirky's law applies here as well: "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
  
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  My first program:
  Hell Segmentation fault
6. Re:SVN for law by Another,+completely · 2012-04-24 23:16 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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?
7. Re:SVN for law by arglebargle_xiv · 2012-04-24 23:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
8. Re:SVN for law by TheDarkMaster · 2012-04-25 01:14 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Exact. In short, many laws are broken by design.
  
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9. Re:SVN for law by ffflala · 2012-04-25 02:00 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
  Law seems to be the social equivalent of TFA: most people will base their entire opinions on the summary, and never bother to actually read the thing itself.
  
  The functional equivalent of an SVN-system already exists and has for decades. What you're describing are very basic components of what is called "legislative history." Bill authors, vote counts, comments made both on the floor of the legislature and in committee: these things (and more) can all be found in the Congressional Record for federal material, and every state legislature has a similar record. Lists of cases that refer to particular laws have been around for well over a century; the various publication types are called annotations, citators, and legal encyclopedias.
  
  The real problem is that very few people will bother to read what is actually out there. Ask yourself: when was the last time you commented on proposed legislation without actually bothering to read it? When was the last time you commented on a court decision without bothering to read the decision? These things are already available, for free, in most cases online and without any ads.
interestingly lawyers do this anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-24 21:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:interestingly lawyers do this anyway by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-25 01:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Lawyers have to play by the rules. That is why they have rules.
  They also try to bend the rules, hack the rules, and find exploits. Lawyers are law nerds, and they hack the law. They also compile manuals that are undecipherable to non-law nerds but make perfect sense to themselves. They write them for themselves, and then they do not understand when others say the whole thing is confusing.
  Sounds oddly familiar.... The only difference between law nerds and computer nerds is that law nerds dress nicer. That and their tv shows are more popular, but that is mostly because of the sex.
2. Re:interestingly lawyers do this anyway by speedplane · 2012-04-25 05:36 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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Just read proposed legislation by MrKaos · 2012-04-24 22:09 · Score: 5, Informative

I've read legislation and proposed changes or even proposed that the legislation be dropped altogether. I mainly got interested in the first round of cybercrime laws that proposed making me a criminal for using netcat nessus and the like.
I set up simple word processing macros that addresses a well written and respectful letter to a list of target politicians (usually all of them). Most of the time I've received some sort of response. It makes it easier for the politician too because they can go straight to the parts of the legislation that are bothersome and move those amendments. If many politicians move the amendments they look insightful to the media, co-operative to their party and hard working to their supporters. Your correspondence, on paper, may make them consider things they hadn't. Also forget email - the retention rate is to low and not portable enough for them to talk to a colleague.
There are many politicians that don't read the legislation at all and just vote on it because they have been sold an opinion or they have to tow the party line. This is why many of the non-partisan issues never get solved and no party want to give the other party the credit for solving a structural issue. So it remains an issue, if enough people write then they can say "Well I tried to do something".
If more people do this it would really make a difference to the quality of the laws we get. I hope it catches on.

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My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Redundant? by TFAFalcon · 2012-04-24 22:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

Isn't hacking the law what lawyers do all the time? They study the law, find holes in it and exploit them.
1. Re:Redundant? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-24 23:06 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Indeed. IAAL, and one of the big reasons I was first attracted to practicing law was the many similarities between legal thinking and computer programming.
Re:Old invention by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-24 22:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yeah, the problem is not so much lack of hacking, but lack of proper code review.
Re:Polishing a turd by ibwolf · 2012-04-24 23:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

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>
huh huh, huhuhuhuh... by Datoyminaytah · 2012-04-24 23:28 · Score: 5, Funny

Feels as though nobody cares if my case is won So I might as well begin to find a loophole on my own Hacking the law, Hacking the law...

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Re:Polishing a turd by mhajicek · 2012-04-25 02:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

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