The ORIG & OBITER ICO for the Parsable Law project
The proposed framework enables processing of law at any level of detail, depending on whether snippets evaluating legal provisions at the lowest elementary level are available. As the code syntax is rather trivial, any lawyer can design new snippets as and when required and contribute them to the public collection, amend existing ones, or simply keep them for her own usage.
The code snippets may contain a more or less elementary piece of law, be it any source of law or any rule outside the legal realm. A collection of snippets forms a library of legal knowledge for further conversion into programming languages.
For study purposes and usage outside regulated legal application the snippets can be open source and perhaps be attributed a credibility score based on public consensus. That credibility would be reflected in probability of accuracy of legal conclusions made by a system based on such snippets. Snippets intended for use in official legal expert systems, however, would need to be endorsed by their issuer and carry a cryptographic signature to guarantee their integrity; so would need executable modules derived from them, to guarantee the authenticity of the legal provisions codified in them and also for the purposes of identifying them among a huge number of other similar snippets. Further, a suitable mechanism for their fast automated “on the fly” verifying needs to be implemented. The distributed ledger technology appears to be an optimal solution here.
The snippets would enable the gargantuan task of gradual creation of a near complete library of the world’s laws and updating it in a piecemeal manner. With a wider popular support, the UML would become a general standard in parsable law and expert system providers would be able to design more advanced products based on that library. Existing expert systems could import snippets in order to extend their own legal knowledge libraries.
As soon as artificial intelligence advances to the point that it can reliably extract legal principles from human readable sources of law, it will also be able to process the snippets as well. And in fact most likely even sooner as they embed structured legal knowledge in a contemporary computer readable form.
The ICO is now live and you can join the cryptoparty at http://www.LegalMachinery.com/ or follow updates at https://twitter.com/psmlondon