DSL Followup: Law in Scheme
It so happens that in class yesterday Sussman showed off some amazing work that he and Chris have been doing rewriting certain legal documents within a scheme based rule system. They showed an example of the oft-cited, somewhat scary deadbeat dad federal law, showing the complicated set of rules necessary to successfully capture the legalese. I’ll get the link up when they put it up.
He took care to point out that the system works only when the investigator is looking for evidence for something already suspected, and wasn’t suited for generalized searching/fishing for transgressions within a large set of potential suspects. However I am confident it could be adapted to this more Orwellian system if desired.
Nevertheless, this sort of work is inspirational when I start thinking about the social contracts models I’ve been throwing around. The way I see it there are two possible ways to relate contract execution to law reasoning:
- like this sort of law system the contract could consist of a set of customized descriptive rules dictating what is allowed and expected from each party (essentially just translations of existing legal contracts),
- the contract is procedural logic, a description of actions taken by the computer rather than the people. People simply have to respond (or not) to the contract execution, and the software reacts and executes accordingly. I like this one better. For my interests in opt-in, independent contractor type situations I think this one makes more sense.