(inspiration) Legislation machine readable for all

Today the CITIP center in Leuven celebrates irs 30rd anniversary.  As a former researcher I was asked to contribute to the lustrum book published.
So I sat down this summer in the CITIP offices to write down an inspirational essay, based on my own frustration as advisor in the Brussels Government and based on the links between  technology and law.
Here is my contribution also to be found in the lustrum book published.  Enjoy

Do we need machine readable laws?

Imagine we would get rid of the foundation of the Napoleon Code and move to a 21st century Code, where speed limit legislation could look like this:

class: kilometers per hour (Variable):

value_type = intdefault_value = 0entity = carlabel = “The speed of the car”
The state of digital transformation: a pile of legislation
The state of digital transformation of the legislative process: ground zero
What happens when legislation needs to be implemented?
When AI ‘does’ the job
Legislation machine readable for all
State council as a Super administrator

This contribution dives into the field of computational law and explains the potential harmful effects of AI on the state of law. 

1. Piled up legislation

We live in a complex world.  The sheer amount of legislation plus corrective legislation to close loopholes of legislation is increasing every year.  The model to try to close the legislative loopholes by adding more legislation makes that every year over 100 000 pages of laws and bylaws are published in the Belgian official journal alone.

It seems that the loop-fixing model no longer works:

-          Maintaining the rule of law becomes more difficult, as one does not know the laws or if there are so many of them, it becomes difficult to not break a law. According to Ilya Somin, George Mason university law professor: ’ “The only way to make major progress toward establishing the rule of law would be to greatly reduce the scope and complexity of legal rules.”

-          Hard coding is known as a bad software engineering practice, as it takes a lot of time and money to maintain a code writing like that.  Legislative text is written in a hard-coded way.

How did we end up in this complexity of legal rules ? The ledger where legislation is initiated has been digitised. The contemporary Parliamentary clerks went from a paper format to a contemporary digital format.

The legislative text, however, continues to be indexed in digital filing cabinets.  A lot of information (often formatted in non-readable PDF and therefore cannot be accessed/read by machines) remains stuck in large legislative databases and reduce the relevance of these ones .

The current legislative parliamentary process has foreseen following checks:

-          a democratic check: amendments are added to legislative proposals, and are kept depending if these amendments comer from majority or opposition, or are part of political bargaining ;

-          a layout check: parliamentary clerks check the layout and translation conformity

-          A legalistic check: the ‘council of state’ indicates if the  proposed legislation written in a legal way , and does not contradict other legislation? *

The legislative process does not foresee an ex-ante quality check to see if it can be implemented correctly.

This has the following impacts:

-          a real complexity of coding IT software programs to legislations full of loopholes like urbanism codes and that have not been written with the end-user in mind;

-          unsuccessful attempt to simplify ex-post the labyrinth created by administrative procedures, with the creation of Kafka like simplification agencies;

-          A judge is supposed to provide a fair judgement, basing itself on the human side of legislation (what is written, what was the spirit of the legislation), the general context, the intention of the legislator , what kind of ‘repair’ to society he/ should give; A judge will be burdened with the massive information, a fragmented access to las and case law, which makes it as a human not possible to make a sound judgement with actual stage of case law for example included.

The simple Donotpay chatbot in 2017 provided an easy and automatic claim system for parking fines.  Municipalities were not happy seeing their income reduced since the legislation was not written in a bulletproof way.   We see AI and start-up apps help citizens to lower the treshold to get better access to legislation.

AI crunching of legislation helps spot legal loopholes; this creates a kind of a legal nirvana structure where  legal loopholes are spotted, used, and one sneaks out before they are fixed. AI crunching of legislation in the hands of a few cold create a class of happy few that will ‘day trade’ on legal systems and might even use AI to create advantageous loophole legislation.

There is a sense of urgency to make legislation machine readable for everyone

-           to remain in a state of law;

-           so that legislation can be correctly implemented;

-          and made easier to understand for everyone

Therefore, the legislation should be written in a non-hard-coded way (technology neutral) and in an open source way, so that everyone can check the source code, and automatically adapt the different IT tools used to implement legislation.

So, if we move to soft code legislation, who will make the software compliance check for the legislation?  It seems logic to give this task to the state council, who already acts like a ‘super IT’ administrator in other aspects of the legislative process.

This would mean that the state council moves up the scale, embraces technology so that a soft coded technology neutral and implementable legislation can be set up .    

These could be the roles for the State Council:

-          machine readable implementation: “does it make sense for AI and computers?”

-          check :“Are there any flaws to be closed?”

-          usability: “is this legislation UX friendly?”

Conclusion

It is time to move from the French code of legally binding texts to a 21St century body of laws that are  written in soft code and can be read by machines..Thanks to new roles given to the State Council, the rule of law will be preserved and AI analysis of legislation will be beneficial for every citizen.