[rayiner]

Interpretation isn't an unguided, irrational process. When your lawyer answers "it depends" its because you've placed him at one point in what's really a decision tree and asked him: "where does it end?" It's like asking a programmer whether a particular token in a C++ program is a type name or an identifier. It depends.

If you imagine the universe of human activity as a multi-dimensional space, you can think of laws as carving out subspaces with lines (that may be more or less fuzzy) and attaching significance to particular subspaces. If I ask: "my x coordinate is 5, where am I?" what do you answer?

[DannyBee]

For the answer, see my future law review paper "A complete multi dimensional polytope model of US law"

[anigbrowl]

I'm not writing one of those either :-)

...although there's been some interesting work from Dan Katz at UMich summarizing progress in this area http://computationallegalstudies.com/