I'm impressed, and I'd love to see it in action. But I'm also worried that this is going in the wrong direction.
If the law is getting too complex for humans to handle, the solution is not to create supercomputers that help us. The solution should be to simplify the law.
If the answers are comprehensive and accurate, this could aid the simplification of law by revealing conflicts and inconsistencies.
Reforming law to be machine readable might eventually provide a litmus test to prevent the passage of bad laws. It could also provide a way to flag prior law that is invalidated by a new law.
The more you simplify the law, the more complex the application of the law becomes.
Murder occurs when a person, of sound memory and discretion, unlawfully kills a person, with malice aforethought.
Seems simple the there are hundreds of cases that tell you what exactly the limits of these elements are. Is being drunk sound mind? What constitutes malice aforethought.
The law is complicated because reality is complicated.
The civil law system keeps it a bit less complicated by not using precedent from old cases. But that means the application in your case is harder to predict. It is your judge making the gut call instead of a history of judges.
> How do we know eliminating some of the complexities of current laws won't re-introduce some of the problems those complexities were trying to solve?
The other side of that coin is: are the bad outcomes produced by the current codebase bad enough that we will replace them and accept the risk of re-introducing the other bugs?
Alternatively, the entire codebase is in English (+/-) so one could document the bugs that changes are attempting to address.
In theory that would be great, and it's been attempted multiple times throughout history - the law has pretty much always been too complex.
The problem is that much (although admittedly not all) of the complexity in the law is a result of attempts to clarify and provide consistency to the nuance and obscure edge cases that occur in real life. Removing that nuance from codified law results in it being even more down to a judge's individual interpretation than it is today, meaning individuals would be even less clear on where they stand than they do now.
If a computer could accurately interpret the law, and that computer was freely available to everyone, I think we'd all be in a far better position.
The law has always been complicated. I'm pretty sure the only people who would be able to "simplify the law" would be lawyers, and I can't really imagine they would think it would be in their best interests to do that.
> The law has always been complicated. I'm pretty sure the only people who would be able to "simplify the law" would be lawyers, and I can't really imagine they would think it would be in their best interests to do that.
Lawyers are often behind movements to simplify the law. The problem is that efforts to simplify the law often lead to (what some substantial group feels are) substantially negative impacts given the complexity of the reality the law is meant to deal with.
Simplifying often sounds better in the abstract than in concrete terms.
Law written by lawyers (e.g. Model Codes, Restatements, Procedural Rules) are usually far shorter and more clear than law written by legislatures. The political process introduces a lot of special cases and legislatures are hesitant to leave discretion to the judiciary. Both for obvious reasons.
Also, it's a reflection of reality and human values, both of which which happen to be very complex, nuanced, and have plenty of edge cases for any rule we might try to dream up.
I think it's a reflection of an uneducated society that cannot apply common sense or the Golden Rule. Everything has to be specified in extreme detail.
> it's a reflection of an uneducated society that cannot apply common sense
The problem of common sense is that everybody has his own, you can't build rules on sand and that's what "common sense" is.
For one person it's common sense to snip bits of genital organs from infants, for the next it's common sense to pray 5 times a day, for yet an other one it's common sense to flog your children to bleeding, outright own other human beings or threaten those who don't agree with you with maiming or death. You will find people telling you it's common sense to have live grenades on your coffee tables, plant anti-personnel mines in your garden, answer a door-knock by shooting through the door or walk around with enough weaponry to take over a small country.
Relying on "common sense" is relying on hyperlocal groupthink, it's not even workable in tribal societies, it's barely workable within a small family.
Common sense is sufficient for most things. The problem with law is that what gets to court are the weird edge cases that aren't covered by common sense.
Often by the time something reaches the court, there is no possible outcome that provides justice for all, and the court instead has to determine which of the parties to screw the least.
Some things have no unequivocal decision metric. e.g. "We know it's not always fair but that's the way we have decided it goes, so everyone knows where they stand".
I think this is demonstrated by Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" [1]
> Because in the real world there are costs of bargaining and information gathering, legal rules are justified to the extent of their ability to allocate rights to the most efficient right-bearer.
There have been some important efforts to make the law more accessible in the last, say, 50 years. E.g.:
* Jury instruction have been rewritten using the minimum number of terms that jurors won't already know.
* Legal decisions are written to be more readable to contemporary laypeople. (At least they seem that way to me -- it's a little hard to tell given the change in writing styles generally.)
* Uniform legal codes have refactored the law to make it more consistent state-to-state, and to remove complexity when for example two causes of action could be reduced to one.
* Property law (which probably moves more slowly than others) has moved away from centuries-old "magic phrases" that could break inexpertly-written deeds.
But all of this is basically syntax. It makes the system easier to learn, but doesn't reduce the fundamental complexity of the model.
And you can't reduce that complexity much, if you want a system that is "fair" and "just" at scale. "Fair" meaning that it treats like cases alike, and different cases differently. "Just" meaning that it mostly comes to what most people consider the right outcome in individual cases.
The scale here is hundreds of millions of people over hundreds of years, any two (or more) of whom can interact in a way they want the law to settle. Treating all of those cases "fairly" means at least one of: already having a rule that roughly guides the outcome for a given dispute (statutes and regulations), or taking into account the decisions other people came to in similar cases in the past (caselaw). Treating the cases "justly" means those rules and analogies have to be fine-grained -- if one of the parties points out a special circumstance in their case, and most people would feel that it should change the outcome, then it needs to be taken into account for the system to be just.
So law is complex because the potential interactions between hundreds of millions of unique individuals are complex.
You might want to reduce complexity by reducing the reach of the law, but I don't think you can reduce it that far and still have a recognizable society. For example, many libertarians would prefer a system with greatly reduced criminal law and commercial regulation -- but where the government still enforces contract and property law in a way that is predictable and fair. The system for fairly, justly, reliably, predictably enforcing the contracts entered by hundreds of millions of people over hundreds of years is going to be complex -- the same kind of complexity we have now.
Obviously the situation could be better or worse -- the stuff I listed at the top are small examples of how it's gotten better. Making the system (say) half as complex would be great. But it wouldn't fundamentally change the problem space, or make tools like Watson unhelpful for solving it.
Things like case law become more complicated due to the march of time. More cases get decided, more case law is created. Another is the question of legislative intent. The edits to law as it is being drafted can be used to argue a case. These edits increase with time.
If the law is getting too complex for humans to handle, the solution is not to create supercomputers that help us. The solution should be to simplify the law.