[ne0n]

I have a question that's off topic from the TPP/TTIP debate. I have another friend that is interested in this topic. Do you think it's possible to create a computer parsable Domain-Specific Language for legal documents? Or maybe to cover a certain subset of legal document types?

[roel_v]

No. (well, I guess it depends on your definition of 'possible').

(have degrees in software engineering & law, have during law school reviewed much of the existing literature in this field from several societies/journals, of which one of my professors was a prominent contributor; there has been much published on this type of stuff, and none of it is deemed (even by the people working on it) remotely feasible for implementation or actual use.)

Start searching e.g. by reading the publications of http://jurix.nl and the literature referenced therein; or google scholar'ing on 'legal ontologies' and going from there.

[anigbrowl]

I disagree with Roel_v and see no fundamental reason why legal texts could not be formalized, but there are good arguments for both positions. Also, he's more knowledgeable than I am so you should discount my opinion a bit. But not too much because I'm super smart :-p

https://computationallegalstudies.com is the blog of law professor Dean Katz, and will probably be of considerable interest to you.

[superuser2]

Try to create a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered fraud, without invoking the concept of reasonable or relying on the contents of the alleged perpetrator's mind.

Human judgement turns out to be pretty important in deciding whether or not something is a crime. That judgement is influenced by argument, guided by precedent, and reviewable by higher authorities, but it is ultimately judgement. It's somewhere between very, very hard and impossible to write laws that catch the edge cases without ensnaring innocent people or being subject to human interpretation.

[IanCal]

While true, I think there could be significant merit in defining one where no complex decision is made by a machine at all. When trying to read these legal documents I struggle a bit with holding all the various bits in my head, a section only applies if A and B are true, and C is over 16, but not if ...

Those same definitions will be used several times. Could they be extracted out? Could we have something that we're able to turn into a series of questions that a lay person could have at least a crack at? I've seen some of those done for tax law in the UK and it really simplifies things (although these are made manually).

Basically, keep humans making those decisions of what is malicious or wilful, and have the law written in such a way as to allow (but not require) a computer to take and combine those decisions.

[nickbauman]

Laws mean only what they are interpreted to mean. So, as in the drift of interpretation of the 2nd Amendment over the years (for example), any formal DSL you could devise would be at the mercy of any sustaining cultural narrative going on around any particular law in question. People aren't computers.