The Cop in the Backseat

tags: Michael Genesereth Rules as Code

Notes

eschews implicit rules of conduct

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commitment to a level of rigor in specifying laws

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The law has answers to all of these questions. But the answers are not available when you need them

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The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words

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this actually doesn't strike me as shocking as the author might want. quite normal in CS for the implementation of a language or library to be extremely compact and elegant, consuming applications sprawling and messy. perhaps similar in law

The rule itself is actually fairly simple. However, there are many conditions

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Intuit's Turbotax is a simple example of a rudimentary Computational Law system

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rudimentary? seems to do quite well

Computational Law systems dispense with traditional documents in favor of data structures that represent legal content in computable form

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(1) the representation of facts and regulations as sentences in formal logic

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(2) the use of mechanical reasoning techniques to derive consequences of the facts and laws so represented.

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Philosophically, Computational Law is closely aligned with the Legal Formalism school of Jurisprudence

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Computational Law is most relevant in Civil Law settings

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limit the application of Computational Law to those cases where such issues can be externalized or marginalized

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We allow human users to make judgments about such open texture concepts in entering data or we avoid regulatory applications where such concepts abound.

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The general problem of open texture when interpreting rules, along with the parallel problem of running out of rules to apply when resolving terms, presents significant obstacles to implementable automated rule-based reasoning.

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data necessary to do legal analysis are already in digital form

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activities are managed by web services with the data and computational resources necessary to apply appropriate regulations

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Project Calc was one of the first projects done in CodeX, under the direction of Harry Surden

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embed compliance checking within the CAD systems used by architects

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The project was never completed due to funding limitations

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In thinking about this sort of Embedded Law, consider the metaphor of the Cop in the Backseat. Suppose that we had the benefit of a friendly policeman in the backseat of our car whenever we drove around

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s m D h, mike