Comments on: Programming in LEGAL

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:51:34 +0000

Anyone looking for some prime examples of MANAGERIAL translation can look at this Slashdot comment.

By: Club Troppo » Missing Link - graphical edition

Club Troppo » Missing Link - graphical edition — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:28:40 +0000

[...] plays with the idea of comparisons between computer programs and legal documents and comes up with LEGAL, the second most verbose coding dialect ever. 22. gilmae: VB, or VerBose. [...]

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 02:16:15 +0000

Further on MANAGERIAL, I saw this linked from CoreEcon: http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/Humor/MBAWriter/

By: Mark McGrath

Mark McGrath — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:22:19 +0000

Jacques, Take a look at Cleardocs. They're a successful local web start-up that has taken the concept automating the production of plain-English legal documents using a browser based content management system. Cleardocs was founded by a legal eagle who also specialised in writing plain-English. Regards, Mark

By: dave

dave — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:32:35 +0000

reminds me of this:

http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/grabs/1acv05/105nl-44.jpg

[Edited to show image inline -Jacques]

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:36:09 +0000

LEGAL (very) occasionally works. MANAGERIAL never works because it is, at root, an anti-language designed and used to obscure, not reveal.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:29:33 +0000

As for MANAGERIAL, a cursory inspection of Dilbert suggests that it is a language composed solely of hashes which point to each other. Any MANAGERIAL statement would compile to another MANAGERIAL statement ad infinitum.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:27:51 +0000

Science fiction, eh? Our Aelius Donatus quote seems doubly apt today.

By: Guise

Guise — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:22:01 +0000

Omni magazine, long ago, published a story – ‘The Language Clarifier’, by Paul J Nahin – in which a couple of programmer-engineers produced, under the influence, a machine which translated LEGAL into plain English. There were these divorce papers …

They had few buyers until they realised that the process worked in reverse, which opened up a much bigger market: academics whose work was too accessible; judges whose decisions were too transparent; lawyers whose contracts were too comprehesible. Feed the simple text into one end and get your obiter dicta out the other.

Then the Government stepped in and bought all the machines, and a new era in bureaucracy began.

Seriously, if anyone out there is even thinking of following Jacques’ lead …

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:15:44 +0000

No doubt the MANAGERIAL speakers among us will advocate moving forward on this problem.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:17:09 +0000

Alan;

That’s the problem. Sometimes it seems as though a list shouldn’t be exhaustive, but it seems like it is. Or seems that it should be exhaustive, but is found to be inclusive.

If lists are going to be inclusive, they should say and the properties ought to be defined up front, rather than having to be guessed at by judges after the fact. Remember that each revision of LEGAL through courts and Parliament takes years and years. Somewhere I hear Agile programmer-prophets screaming in horror! :)

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:49:56 +0000

Reforming legal language would be a significant gain to everyone. However, there are traps for the unwary. Declaring a list exhaustive should not necessarily make it exhaustive and the effort to write exhaustive lusts is one of the things that leads to turgid and opaque language. Conveyancing sounds in a particularly obscure way because several centuries of lawyers and (much more often their clerks) could make money by trying to write exhaustive lists of the interests being transferred. We’re moving slowly from fussy law to fuzzy law, but simple declarations won’t achieve a great deal.

Once LEGAL is translated into a human language we can attack real horror shows like MANAGERIAL.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:21:13 +0000

It might be fun to ruminate about, but who is going to debug it?

At the moment debugging takes years and a pack of lawyers. Debugging has become easier as part of the move to higher level languages and the clever tools which have followed.

I don’t think you can replace LEGAL, but you can try to apply useful methods for coping with complex abstract systems which computer nerds have discovered. The idea of a “LEGAL compiler” is just one such tool.

I don’t think it’d be Lispish somehow. Too dynamic. It’d be a whip-and-bondage strict type arrangement I’m guessing. SML or somesuch. Prolog is also a good model due to its pattern-matching and deductive nature, which is a lot like legal reasoning.

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 10:59:50 +0000

It might be fun to ruminate about, but who is going to debug it? Computers have a weighty authority in their fields of expertise (lots of numbers, lots of decisions, very quickly). If the uber law computer said you were in the wrong according to it’s arcane programming (and legalese is very arcane), who are you as a mere mortal to argue with it? While I don’t envisage a RoboCop type situation, I do envisage many, many late nights staring at a screen trying to work out why little alex is in jail for sedition for drawing innapriopriate pictures of the queen. Given lawyers and their preference for brackets, my guess is that it would look like Lisp – a language all but incomprehensible to anyone other than the author.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 09:44:54 +0000

Prolog is probably the most closely related programming language, actually. I was thinking today that LEGAL is already a boolean algebra, just not well defined.

By: The Doctor

The Doctor — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 09:26:44 +0000

LEGAL reminds me of Prolog!

By: Don Quixote

Don Quixote — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 08:36:44 +0000

Jacques, there’s a post about seven back from this one titled ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’. I don’t seem to be able to get my comment to drop into it. Any ideas?

Cheers,