Properly drafted English-language laws do read as code. It's like how you can describe formal logic in English: "All Americans wear hats. I am an American. Therefore I wear a hat."
I take it you're arguing for something like Lojban, though. I see two problems there. First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land. Second, and probably more incurably, these types of languages don't remove the most important kinds of ambiguity in laws.
Most disputes over ambiguity in legal text do not arise from syntactic ambiguity. It's not usually confusion over what words the "not" modifies, or which "if" is nested within which. Rather, most problems arise from semantic ambiguity, i.e. the meaning of the individual words. What constitutes a "bank," exactly? What does it mean to do something "in a reasonable period of time?" If you're "bearing" arms, where exactly are you bearing them?
You might argue that the problem then comes down to defining your terms well. That's certainly a noble goal when drafting legal text. But one of the principle goals of legal drafting is to make the text flexible enough to apply to specific circumstances that the authors could not have foreseen. This, of course, is in constant tension with the need to be precise. The more precise you are, the easier it is to interpret the law, but the more likely it is that someone will find a loophole arising from the excessive narrowness of your language.
A language like Lojban won't alleviate these difficulties, unfortunately.
> First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land...
Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand, and makes the same problem. I think it's more accessible to run something through a compiler...
> Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand
This is why I'm against EULAs. As a non-lawyer, it's an asymmetrical game--I have no idea what the legaleese I'm agreeing to actually means in a court.
I've never taken a law class, but I've read and understood many, many statutes and contracts. I'm sure you could too.
Does that mean all legal drafting is clear? No. But much of it is sufficiently clear for a literate person to understand. By way of example, I've chosen a passage from the Illinois criminal code, more or less at random:
"Theft of property not from the person and not exceeding $500 in value is a Class 4 felony if the theft was committed in a school or place of worship or if the theft was of governmental property."
This is a typical example of legalese. It bakes several conditions into one sentence: 1) not from the person, 2) value under $500, 3) in a school, 4) in a place of worship, 5) on government property. Most legal writing I've encountered is at roughly this level of complexity.
Certainly, there's a lot of logic packed into that one sentence. There's much more to parse out than there is in a typical newspaper sentence. But I'm willing to bet most people can read that law and understand what it means. (Not that you'd necessarily know what a Class 4 felony is. But you'd know some of the circumstances under which a theft qualifies as one.)
It might take years to become a lawyer, but I bet their are more than a few people here who have spotted an error (international or accidental) in a contract that has passed under the eyes if a lawyer or two. My wife and have caught several major errors in our time that could have cost us a lot of money. There is no substitute for a careful reading of a contract, legal training optional.
The problem is that legalese is specially designed to make meaning today out of decisions made a century ago based on laws written over 2 centuries ago which inherit from a common law framework that came to this continent about 3 centuries ago and dates back to precedents that predate the modern English language.
If we were to make everything be written in normal English, the same problem would eventually re-emerge.
I recently read Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses. RM built most major highways and parks in NY state, and effectively became an absolute ruler in his domain. For 40 years he exercised near total control. It made me understand the political process completely different way.
For RM, the 'broken' differencing format was a feature, not a bug. It allowed him to slip though all kinds of law changes without people understanding what he was up to. The book has many, many examples of exactly this differencing format being put to use to gain power.
The point about the differencing format is more broadly true - prior to reading the book, I thought politics was about having the right ideas, and explaining them clearly. But the book compellingly argues that politics is really about obtaining and wielding power. The people who thrive in politics are more interested in power than ideas.
It is a book that is well worth reading, especially if you are an idealistic programmer (like I was) who cannot understand why we can't just 'clean politics up.' (Also, Caro's LBJ biography is awesome, with similar themes.)
"...politics is really about obtaining and wielding power. The people who thrive in politics are more interested in power than ideas."
This should be the preface to every history book. BTW, s/politics/business/ and it is still true.
Not to say that politics and business are not interested in ideas... they are, but not fundamentally. Ideas are only a means to power. Understand this and you will understand much about an idea you wish to see implemented.
The view that law is code is a common fallacy. In the law there is seldom a right answer, merely answers that can be argued to be more right than others in the given context.
Because law is not expressible as code. The phrase, "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is captured in human language for good reason — it contains embedded values and cultural assumptions that cannot be written objectively.
> English, specifically whatever dialect that is, is a horrible medium for encoding laws.
Compared to what, exactly?
> Further, the diffing format used there is atrocious.
That's a really common problem.
> Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?
Mostly, because there is no first party money in it, and there's considerable expense to do it as a third-party solution, because of exactly the problem that this is directed at solving.
There's quite a bit of money in third-party solutions, which are provided by several vendors to the people who have the money and motivation to pay for them (people who professionally deal with the law), as components of wider research suites that cover more than just statute law (including many copyright-protected sources).
Third-party solutions that use only the free-of-copyright public information don't have a lot of market, and would have a lot of expense to create and maintain (not the system, so much as keeping the data current.)
English is not the problem here. You can write sufficiently clear language (which is not formated with caps lock..) in English. The problem is just the custom in United States of writing complex laws instead of writing the main points and letting the courts interpret it. For example, here's[1] a reasonably sane-looking law written in English.
http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=S05725&term=2013 http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=A07844&term...