Legalese can be considered an extremely inefficient language, and it certainly has ambiguities. What attempts exist out there to use programming languages (or any symbolic logic approaches, for that matter) to model legal code (such as laws and contracts)?
A:
Have you looked into Business Rule Engines? Not the same as legalese, but it might be a good starting point.
The only other real programming language that might be applicable to model legal codes (that I can think of) might be Prolog... but even that might be a stretch.
FrustratedWithFormsDesigner
2010-04-07 13:31:12
+2
A:
Almost all contracts and legal documents contain multiple use of the word 'reasonable', and this does not easily equate to programming logic. Similarly terms like 'where practicable' mean that the range of implicit conditions required by legal documents are not going to be covered in a piece of code.
meepmeep
2010-04-07 14:37:48
I consider poorly-defined and ambiguous terms to be more like a bug than a feature. I'm more curious about what *kind* of law might be possible with purely logical terms (built upon some set of axioms, obviously), rather than how to merely take an existing piece of law and translate it more-or-less verbatim.
agnoster
2010-04-12 18:16:48