Hacking the Law 115
New submitter sethopia writes "Brooklyn Law School's Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP) hosted its first 'Legal Hackathon.' Instead of hacking computer code, attendees — mostly lawyers, law students, coders, and entrepreneurs — used the hacking ethos to devise technologically sophisticated solutions to legal problems. These included attempts to crowdsource mayoral candidacies in New York City and hacking model privacy policies for ISPs."
SVN for law (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Interesting)
Somalia does this, except they use git.
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Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to hack law ? Then start by by putting the entire code of law in an SVN-like system. Including proposed laws. With traceability of authors, who voted for them, etc... And an associated wiki for comments. And a complete list of cases that used them. This would be invaluable.
If we're going that route, the author/voting records should link to a database of campaign contributions as well.
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... and yet no one will care. OH dont get me wrong. Some will. But the vast majority punch their straight ticket D or R and are *very* happy with that choice. Their team 'won'/'lost'.
They will even go as far as to take on whatever attributes their 'team' has to defend it. Even though if you sit them down and talk about it they really want the other 'team'. A perfect example of this effect is when Howard Stern went to Harlem and asked people what they thought about Obama and used John McCain's talking
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a lot of media coverage focuses on analyzing who's winning/losing rather than discussing issues. That's probably why.
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Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than a version control system, I think it would be more useful to put the law into a requirements management system (after all, what is the law but a set of requirements?) That *might* help lawmakers to see if they are complete (cover what is intended to be covered), consistent and measurable.
If you try and push this, you'll run into serious real-world acceptance problems. In some cases the law is deliberately obtuse, obscure, open to misinterpretation, and so on. It's this way by design, because two various groups couldn't agree on any wording, or they were under pressure to create a law that violates the laws of physics but managed to word it in such a way that it may not, or it's meant to be interpreted in a way that's more or less the opposite of what it says, or a thousand other reasons. The law is not a Turing machine, and never will be. The last thing most politicians or lawyers would want is a comprehensive overview system of the kind that's being proposed in the above posts.
Re:SVN for law (Score:4, Insightful)
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In short, many laws are broken by design.
Name one. Highlight the specific language that is broken and explain why it is broken. We all purport to be rational people on /., right? Let's see the data instead of accepting statements like this as self-evident.
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Sorry dude. The laws of my country that I could use as example would not make sense to you, much less written in English rather than Portuguese (I'm terrible to write in English and the Google translation sucks to anything more complex). But would be enough to you stop a little to think and analyze the laws of your country, you inevitably would find many examples by yourself.
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Exact. In short, many laws are broken by design.
The proper response to this is not to accept the situation as inevitable. The proper response is to try to fix them.
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If you try and push this, you'll run into serious real-world acceptance problems
Only because it's a good idea.
The last thing most politicians or lawyers would want is a comprehensive overview system of the kind that's being proposed in the above posts.
I don't care what lawyers and politicians want. What do the people want? I expect they want a legal system that's consistent and verifiable without spending your lifes savings on an attorney.
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Me too. But remember that are lawyers and politicians who make the laws, and their idea is to make you have to spend your savings in lawyers.
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Which is why the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
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All:
God save your majesty!
Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
Cade:
Nay, that I mean to do.
Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lets-kill-all-lawyers [enotes.com]
I haven't been able to find it in the original Klingon, apologies.
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That would require the people proposing the laws to admit that the sole purpose is a sincerely dislike of a group of people and the desire to disenfranchise them, which bluntly stated would result in outrage. The pill is far easier to swallow when it's coated in legalese sugar. Dura lex, sed lex.
Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Interesting)
You want the same people that spent at least 5 years studying this crap and make their living out of it to work actively to simplify it. It is a great idea, but I do not have any hope of seeing this applied.
Shirky's law applies here as well: "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
Re:SVN for law (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm pretty sure that is Bill Gates' law, actually.
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seemed like a normal possessive apostrophe to me.
"s's" is a mess
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It's not clear that common law makes the situation any better. It may seem to do so when the relevant legal history is short but when you have many centuries of precedents, laws, and other confusion, it hardly makes things simpler.
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Both statute laws and court cases that form binding precedent (as well as some that don't) are published. As are products that link from one to the other. Its not impossible to trace them, but it does take work, but you don't have to do all of it yourself, as there are organizations that expend considerable resources doing this,
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Its not impossible to trace them, but it does take work, but you don't have to do all of it yourself, as there are organizations that expend considerable resources doing this, and will, for a fee, let you have access to their work product.
But if LexusNexus didn't make a particular link, or a non-binding precedent would be persuasive and the link isn't drawn (or you use Westlaw and your opposition uses LexusNexus and the information going into court isn't parallel), then you could have issues.
With a suitable structure, you could try to crowsdsource this work, but I suspect you'd find that the universe of people with both the skills and willingness to be objective needed to do it well and the universe of people with the motivation to do it for free have less overlap than you might want.
That and non-binding precedents are great to have, even if, well, not binding.
My "solution" is that if a law is stricken or modified by a ruling, then the written law is ordered to be changed to reflect the finding, with a 30 day delay to allow the legi
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just acquiring a complete listing which could be called "the code of law", translating all laws ever written into a single static document with all modifications made in-place, all "removed by another law" sections having been actually removed, completely ignoring all history and just trying to get a single snapshot of the current state of how things are presently codified, would be more than a lifetime's worth of work.
Start a kickstarter project for it and go wild.
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Collaborative systems only work when everyone is trying to collaborate, but law is mostly about benefiting yourself and screwing others. Open source software can have different build options and forks for those who strongly disagree with the mainline version, the law cannot (unless you are religious which seems to allow certain opt-outs).
Re:SVN for law (Score:4, Interesting)
Want to hack law ? Then start by by putting the entire code of law in an SVN-like system. Including proposed laws. With traceability of authors, who voted for them, etc... And an associated wiki for comments. And a complete list of cases that used them. This would be invaluable.
Law seems to be the social equivalent of TFA: most people will base their entire opinions on the summary, and never bother to actually read the thing itself.
The functional equivalent of an SVN-system already exists and has for decades. What you're describing are very basic components of what is called "legislative history." Bill authors, vote counts, comments made both on the floor of the legislature and in committee: these things (and more) can all be found in the Congressional Record for federal material, and every state legislature has a similar record. Lists of cases that refer to particular laws have been around for well over a century; the various publication types are called annotations, citators, and legal encyclopedias.
The real problem is that very few people will bother to read what is actually out there. Ask yourself: when was the last time you commented on proposed legislation without actually bothering to read it? When was the last time you commented on a court decision without bothering to read the decision? These things are already available, for free, in most cases online and without any ads.
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and legalese is painful to read compared to even regular documents of similar length.
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It's only fair, we have a number of verified cases where a legislator has admitted to not reading an entire bill before voting for it.
Perhaps it's time to admit that ignorance of the law isn't just an excuse, it's inevitable.
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We should be clear about the problem. All this information actually is publicly available: the US Code is versioned by codification year (a new version is codified every six years with interim supplements), and you can find out who voted for or introduced what (including amendments) in the Congressional record. The Code of Federal regulations and the Federal Register serve an analogous function for agency regulations.
So the problem is not the availability of the information. It is all publicly available fro
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This much is true.
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You probably need to start first with 100% codification of statute law, which no jurisdiction in the US that I am aware of has (certainly, the federal government does not), and establishing a fundamental (e.g., Constitutional
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There would be a lot of firsts there. Currently there is no existing 'book' that contains the test of all of the laws as amended, much less as understood by the courts or perverted by the DOJ and FBI.
Good (Score:2)
Because the question is not if legal problems will be hacked, but when, it is better to just get it over with. This way, with the results out in the open, the law can be improved.
And hopefully, this also gives lawmakers a chance to form their own opinions rather than being fed opinions from big business lobbyists... although I am not too optimistic about that.
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Here's the important part:
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Heresy! No, the logic is right, but semicolons in Python?!
interestingly lawyers do this anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
computer programmers try to play by the rules: they read the manual and then try to follow what they've learned. Lawyers, meanwhile, are hacking the laws by default. They're always trying to get around following the manual.
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... and the major problem is that the law seem to have been written by the same developers that wrote mush of Adobe's Flash code. It needs a major refactoring to get rid of the holes. (Sorry to pick on Adobe, but I have an RSS feed just for warnings for exploits in their software).
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Legal arguments, and the law is all about interpretation, nothing is fixed and everything is always open to re-interpretation at a later date
This is like having code that changes what it does depending on what certain people think it should do currently ....this is not hackable ..
Or conversely it is what lawyers get paid the big bucks to do all day every day ...
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Re:interestingly lawyers do this anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree entirely. Having spent a few years studying law, one of my earliest observations was that 'reasonable' was code for 'let the courts figure it out'.
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Tommy rot. Judges and juries have opinions; compilers do not.
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Lawyers have to play by the rules. That is why they have rules.
They also try to bend the rules, hack the rules, and find exploits. Lawyers are law nerds, and they hack the law. They also compile manuals that are undecipherable to non-law nerds but make perfect sense to themselves. They write them for themselves, and then they do not understand when others say the whole thing is confusing.
Sounds oddly familiar.... The only difference between law nerds and computer nerds is that law nerds dress nicer. That an
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What a load of BS. Most computer programmers most certainly don't try to play by the rules nor do they ever RTFM (hell, the term exists for a reason). They hack something up, change it randomly until it compiles and ship it.
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computer programmers try to play by the rules:
RTFM? You are joking right?
Old invention (Score:1)
Contributions to laws is called legislation, which is part of democracy that was invented about 2500 years ago.
Re:Old invention (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the problem is not so much lack of hacking, but lack of proper code review.
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Favourite? I thought their opinion was that it was "from that country where everything sucks, huh huh, heh heh".
Just read proposed legislation (Score:5, Informative)
I've read legislation and proposed changes or even proposed that the legislation be dropped altogether. I mainly got interested in the first round of cybercrime laws that proposed making me a criminal for using netcat nessus and the like.
I set up simple word processing macros that addresses a well written and respectful letter to a list of target politicians (usually all of them). Most of the time I've received some sort of response. It makes it easier for the politician too because they can go straight to the parts of the legislation that are bothersome and move those amendments. If many politicians move the amendments they look insightful to the media, co-operative to their party and hard working to their supporters. Your correspondence, on paper, may make them consider things they hadn't. Also forget email - the retention rate is to low and not portable enough for them to talk to a colleague.
There are many politicians that don't read the legislation at all and just vote on it because they have been sold an opinion or they have to tow the party line. This is why many of the non-partisan issues never get solved and no party want to give the other party the credit for solving a structural issue. So it remains an issue, if enough people write then they can say "Well I tried to do something".
If more people do this it would really make a difference to the quality of the laws we get. I hope it catches on.
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There are many politicians that don't read the legislation at all and just vote on it because they have been sold an opinion or they have to tow the party line.
Sounds a lot like the Slashdot moderation system.
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Wow, thanks for the thoughtful and constructive post that is a refreshing change from the kneejerk cynicism/fatalism that is the usual Slashdot groupthink.
I once was on a plane and sat next to a state legislator. I brought up the concept of gerrymandering electoral districts, and argued that it's unfair to moderate voters and creates a less responsive, more divisive political culture. I think he honestly hadn't thought much about these issues before and I hopefully influenced his opinion a bit. Also it'
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Do you have any specific stories or evidence which let you to believe you made a difference?
Absolutely, and not just one, but enough time for one.
My first effort was at a state level. The proposed legislation would impose a censorship regime on all web sites for businesses in our state, a cool $25,000 per business that wanted a web site and the associated departmental time and paperwork to process it before you could publish - lest be liable for severe penalties.
I know they didn't read email so that is where I had the idea of using word processing macros to generate letters. I decided then that
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...because they have been sold an opinion or they have to tow the party line.
It's 'toe' not 'tow'.
Yes, thanks for looking that up...jerk.
Redundant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't hacking the law what lawyers do all the time? They study the law, find holes in it and exploit them.
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Indeed. IAAL, and one of the big reasons I was first attracted to practicing law was the many similarities between legal thinking and computer programming.
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What the lawyers do is in most cases cracking: They abuse the holes in the law.
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Polishing a turd (Score:2, Insightful)
The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.
Re:Polishing a turd (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.
Yes, because - as every software developer know firsthand - when you throw out an old crufty system and develop a brand, sparkling, new one in its place it is always a smooth process that provides tremendous benefits
</sarcasm>
Re:Polishing a turd (Score:4, Insightful)
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It does have its share of issues and cruft, though. I can't for the life of me figure out how to close the "ooh_titties.exe" process.
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And may I propose that in the new system, the *intent* of the rules should be documented alongside the rules, to prevent the system from being abused.
Example - instead of stating "Bicycles should be equipped with lights" a rule could state "Bicyclists are hard to see in the dark. To prevent bicyclists from getting hurt or killed due to being poorly visible, bicycles should be equipped with lights ".
Let's say someone is dressed up in bright, glow-in-the-dark clothing but is riding a bike without light. Or on
conference committee (Score:2)
actually, the House and Senate can pass different versions of a bill, but then it goes to a conference committee. something could go wrong at this step as well.
abuse of riders/amendments is a problem, but what's the legalese for "one thing at a time"? That's another problem.
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Not if it is going to be become law.
A conference committee is an entity to which a bill is referred in order that a single bill to be passed by identically by the House and Senate can be crafted. The bill that actually becomes law has to be passed identically by both Houses.
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yes, that's part of the conference committee process. I should have been more clear about that.
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The first amendment explicitly excepts cases where your speech causes harm to others.
No it doesn't. Here is what it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Anything else is just a matter of interpretation or skirting around due process. A literalist would not see any limits as to what speech is protected.
Also your fire in a theater example is no longer good law. You'll want to read Brandenberg instead.
aspects of the Constitution (Score:2)
Yes, the Constitution is often very clear. The literal wording doesn't make reasonable exceptions like that; if it did, the document wouldn't be so clear anymore.
Yeah, taking it too literally and making up exceptions both seem like bad ideas
Sometimes it isn't clear enough, especially when dealing with situations or technology the Founders hadn't envisioned.
Amendments to add or remove a reasonable exception wouldn't fly because of the group negatively affected.
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Actually, judges do take into account the intent of laws as well as the letter of the law. For instance, if there's a controversy about what a particular word or phrase means in a law, they look up what legislators or the executive said about it when they passed it.
For instance, with your bicycle law, the law might have been not "bicycles must have lights" but "bicyclists must make reasonable efforts to remain visible to other traffic." And then the question is what "reasonable efforts" constitutes, and why
huh huh, huhuhuhuh... (Score:5, Funny)
laws were made to be hacked not broken (Score:2)
rms was the first to use this concept. (Score:2)
Attorneys thought he was absolutely crazy. And some still do.
But it worked.
Which is why some masters of thought control are trying to undermine it.
California Gun Laws have been hacked (Score:2)
Check out www.calguns.net for a description of a gun law hack in California.
Want to own an AR-15 series rifle in California? You can, thanks to the work of some online collaboration and combination of laws.
In a nutshell, the definition of 'detachable magazine' combined with the poorly written assault weapons law, some case law and testimony from the California Dept of Justice Firearms folks resulted in a movement for building AR series rifles legally in California with all the goodies like pistol grips, et