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That's precisely the sort of thing we have courts, and vast quantities of precedent, to decide.

Don't make the classic programmer's mistake of expecting everything in the law to need to be as well defined as things are in mathematics. Judges will quite happily decide what a term means on the fly, consistent with precedent and reasonableness, to stop you getting away with anything completely ridiculous.



Exactly. I think programmers assume that law is a simple application of rules to facts, and that a computer could do it better/faster/cheaper than humans.

But in fact there is so much subtlety and nuance to it that I don't understand how computers could ever do it. I mean, you're trying to persuade a human being that your version of the facts is more compelling than your opponents. Last time I checked computers were not very persuasive orators or writers....




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