As a fellow Finn (and a lawyer), super interesting work Elias! And thank you for reporting the inconsistencies you found to Finlex

In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read:

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html

• quietbritishjim

  today at 11:42 AM

  Thanks for the interesting read. But, I have to say, I didn't understand it at all.

  • bombcar

    today at 11:44 AM

    Yes, it was very kafkaesque. (I also didn't get it.)

my favorite quote in this space has always been:

the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more profound, are what i mean by the law.

I guess this is not meant as a general introduction, but it would have been useful to acknowledge the differences between different legal systems somewhere at the start?

(Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)

Audrey Tang did a lot of things related to this whilst they were Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

> Parliament cannot restate the entire legal corpus each session.

IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that.

Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.

• mishellaneous

  today at 11:52 AM

  that would slow down the process considerably. it would also not be of much use to the professionals, which i guess make up the majority of those involved most of the time, and so, i guess, would not have much support.

  IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder

• qnpnpmqppnp

  today at 11:15 AM

  How would it work though?

  Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.

Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting...

Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.

I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!

• mishellaneous

  today at 11:47 AM

  > Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents.

  at that point why not just use something precise like a programming language? have there been efforts in that direction? genuine questions

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