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Attorney Jim Hazard is Working to Open-Source Law (Video)
Jim Hazard is a lawyer who leans geek; since he got his law degree in 1979, he's been the guy in the office who could make sense of things technical more often than others could, and dates his interest in regularizing complex legal documents (and making them a bit *less* complex) back to the era where Wang word processors were being replaced with personal computers. Most documents -- no matter how similar to each other, and how much work was spent in re-creating similar parts -- were "pickled" in proprietary formats that didn't lend themselves to labor-saving generalization and abstraction. That didn't sit well with Jim, and (in the spirit of Larry Lessig's declaration that "law is code," Hazard has been working for years to translate some of the best practices and tools of programmers (like code re-use, version control systems, and hierarchies of variables) to the field of law, in particular to contract formation. (Think about how many contracts you're party to; in modern life, there are probably quite a few.) He calls his endeavor Common Accord, and he'd like to see it bring the benefits of open source to both lawyers and their clients.
I gave up during the third Ad. Maybe later.
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According to the Supreme Court of the United States, any law that is not understandable to the average 8th grader is "Unconstitutionally Vague."
According to Common Law dating back to the Code of Hammurabi, any law that is not freely published for all people to read is null and void.
As an anarchist, I love things just the way they are!
how did an inline image for the flash link get through the slashdot submission process? hell, anything with any kind of multimedia should be blocked, only a simple link with text between tags should be allowed.
gah! that was awful. let's keep the format clean.
I have been on slashdot regularly under one ID or another since day one. I even remember chips and dip. I have never been one to complain about the many things that people have complained about regarding slashdot over the years. I always thought it was campy... This is something else. First, what is up with the way this is rendering on the front page? I know I'm not the only one seeing it, per below posts. How can you screw that up? I mean really? Second, when I saw that there was a second ad before the interview, I was dismayed. When I saw the second ad had a runtime of 70 seconds, I said fuck it, stopped the video, and won't be playing it again. Multiple ads before a video, with one of them weighing in at 70 seconds? I know you have to make money, but not even CNN would try and pull that stunt (yet). Third, have you guys been screwing with the code in general lately? I've seen some rendering issues over the last few weeks that require a reload, and sometimes I click to read the comments for a story where I have not yet viewed the comments, only to find myself dumped off in the middle or even end as though it's trying to take me to where I left off on a page yet visited, but rarely at the top. What is going on? Are you about to lose funding and making desperate moves. Please explain yourself, slashdot.
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oh no, we're moving toward the rule of "police state and corporate fascist" law. Certain types of laws will be very strictly enforced, for the majority of people.
Now that I'm semi-solo, I have a Git repository for all my client files. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX class and style files to make beautiful patents, pleadings, and contracts. I write patents in vi (well, Vim) when I can get away with it. But when I was at a big firm, I spent fruitless years trying to convince lawyers that there is a better way than using kludged, recycled Word files, or at least trying to convince them to use Word's style functionality instead of manually reformatting the same flipping document EVERY SINGLE TIME. All in vain. Heck, I'd be happy if I could finally convince other lawyers that underlining is not a legitimate typesetting operation and is an embarrassing holdover from the days of typewriters (along with two spaces after a period).
One thing I've learned about lawyers it that most old lawyers learned how to do something back in 1978 or so, and believe it is the One Right Way. Those lawyers learned the One Right Way from other lawyers who learned it in the 30s. If I were king of the world, I would force every lawyer in America to get a copy of Butterick's book Typography for Lawyers and Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, read them cover to cover, and treat them as though they were the inviolable word of God, handed down in stone from the peak of Mt. Carmel. I am so sick of looking at ugly legal documents.
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As a software developer, I agree that lawyers could learn a lot from software development methodology. However, when we start talking about applying software representations to law and making it 'computable', we should remember that a fundamental property of software (at least so far) is that it is brittle. I don't think you want law to be brittle. I don't think you want legal contracts that can be subverted by a buffer overflow (although that definitely would make things interesting).
Laws as they are often implemented also have a tendency toward brittleness, often due to over-specificity. Laws should have a purpose and be based on principles, and it should be possible to challenge either a particular application of a law, or its existence, on the basis of failing to serve its purpose or violating its principles. A law is a mechanism for implementing a policy. But it is a characteristic of mechanisms that they often have edge cases that they cannot handle,and with sufficient complexity, bugs are inevitable.
One can view our court system as acting in a role that is somewhat analogous to a support organization for software. But its ability to issue patches mostly takes the form of declaring laws unconstitutional, or establishing precedents for the interpretation of a law, which they hope will have the force of law. We really need actual bug reporting and tracking for laws, and to hold our legislatures accountable for fixing them.
Just turn off javascript, all better.
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When you go to sign a contract you are able to see the terms of the agreement (otherwise it wouldn't be binding). A closed source legal agreement example would be the statements you used to find on boxed software such as "By purchasing this software you agree to the license agreement contained within."
Linux is open source but you don't expect everyone that runs it to be able to understand the code. That's not the point. Lawyers are like exactly like developers in that they are educated to understand the code of law. The rest of us are users and when we need advice we go to see a "developer".
I do think it is important to make law understandable to a greater number of people but when you confuse the terminology used to describe your mission. It sounds more like he's trying to use software development methodologies to create legal contracts. I'd hate to be at the conference when the waterfall vs.Agile method debate breaks out between the lawyers.