When logic lays down the law
This work addresses the challenge of ensuring logical perfection and unambiguity in laws for policymakers and legal technologists, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the problem of ambiguous and imperfect computable laws by analyzing a road transport regulation, demonstrating how logical rewriting can improve clarity, and proposing desiderata for assessing and composing future laws.
We analyse so-called computable laws, i.e., laws that can be enforced by automatic procedures. These laws should be logically perfect and unambiguous, but sometimes they are not. We use a regulation on road transport to illustrate this issue, and show what some fragments of this regulation would look like if rewritten in the image of logic. We further propose desiderata to be fulfilled by computable laws, and provide a critical platform from which to assess existing laws and a guideline for composing future ones.