[aflag]

That's exactly what I wanted to comment. The project frankly seems quite naive. At first, I thought it was a joke project. Only to realise, reading the comments, that it was a serious one.

I think the idea that laws are strict rules that are enforced in a robot-like fashion is a common misconception, specially in engineering circles. That's not true in civil law and certainly not true in common law. There are very simple and straightforward cases that can be thought more or less like that, but almost all criminal cases and many civil cases too are very much a game of convincing other people and not satisfying a set of rules. Jury equity is a thing, technically you can acquit someone by not making any efforts into convincing the jury that your client didn't break the law.

The law does not have the last say, humans do. Loopholes are just loopholes as much as the court considers them to be valid.

[slver]

Yes laws can’t be implemented in a straightforward and neutral way. That’s not a benefit of laws or something we need to preserve. Exactly the opposite.

The fact the process is sitting on a case for YEARS because they can't decide how to interpret the facts, or which laws apply, or what they mean, or even simply due to the procedure being enormously inefficient for everyone involved, in fact usually means that whether you are found guilty or not in the end... you lose.

And humans can always have the last say. Computers don’t take that away from anyone. Having computable law doesn't mean 100% of it is computed by dry algorithms.

[aflag]

The goal of the justice system is not to be efficient or fast, it is to be just. It is a last resort for complicated cases that can't be easily settled between the parties. You don't want to have every single dispute going through the justice system. That sounds like a dystopian authoritarian future. You want the people in society to self organize and settle their matter privately as much as possible.

It is very much a benefit that it's interpretative and slow. We want it to reflect the culture and people's common sense. We want it to be as fail proof as possible (even if it take ages to come up with all the evidence and arguments). And fail proof here is not to interpret the law in the most pedantic of ways, but in the way that is the most just. The reason for lawyers and courts are exactly the edge cases that are difficult to agree upon.

[soco]

And when we look at the actual status of the smart contracts, we realize how far actual programming is from their own stated goals... They call the incidents "hacks" although we simply see incomplete contracts being used the way they were written, in some edge case.