In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read:

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html

my favorite quote in this space has always been:

the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more profound, are what i mean by the law.

I guess this is not meant as a general introduction, but it would have been useful to acknowledge the differences between different legal systems somewhere at the start?

(Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)

Audrey Tang did a lot of things related to this whilst they were Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

> Parliament cannot restate the entire legal corpus each session.

IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that.

Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.

Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting...

Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.

I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!

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