Re: Hackers and Painters and Lawyers

["Peter J. Wasilko, Esq." <address@hidden>]

> 
> Given the spaghetti mess that is the current state of legal code, this 
> strikes me as a dubious analogy. Well, perhaps not in your offices :)
> 
> I was IMing with a friend the other day, remarking that it would be 
> nice to have more programmers in Congress - perhaps they could 
> mercilessly refactor the current U.S. Code.
> 
> Zac

Hi Zac and All,

    We were talking about private contract law drafted by rational parties, not public legislative processes.

    Once you introduce big money politics and lobbyists to the mix all bets are off.

    However, I would note that the "Law and AI" community has looked at normalizing the logical forms of statutory law with an eye towards making legislation machine interpretable, although I doubt the political types would ever adopt their recommendations.


Warmest Regards,

Peter


_________________________________________________________________

Peter J. Wasilko, Esq.
     J.D., LL.M.               

Executive Director, The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

Visit us on the web at: http://www.ieuc.org

_________________________________________________________________

Its time to abandon brittle architectures with poorly factored
interfaces, gratuitous complexity, and kludged designs dominated
by sacrifices on the altar of backwards compatibility.

Such artifacts are vulnerable to cyber-attack, weigh down the
economy costing trillions of dollars in lost productivity, and
suffer from an impoverished conceptual model that lacks the
integration and elegance needed to empower end users to
get the most from advanced applications in the future.

_________________________________________________________________
The Institute for End User Computing --- Pursuing Secure, Simple, 
   Supple, & Sophisticated Systems to Unlock Our Human Potential
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* The Institute is incorporated under New York State's
   Not-For-Profit Corporation Law