Deconstructing Legal Text: Object-Oriented Design in Legal Adjudication

Featured in MIT Computational Law course.

Rules are pervasive in the law. In the context of computer engineering, the translation of legal text into algorithmic form is seemingly direct. In large part, the field of law may be ripe for expert systems and machine learning. For engineers, existing law appears formulaic and logically reducible to ‘if, then’ statements. The underlying assumption is that the legal language is both self-referential and universal. Moreover, descriptions are considered distinct from interpretations, i.e. in describing the law, the language is seen as quantitative and objectifiable. Nevertheless, is descriptive formal language purely dissociative? From the logic machine of the 1970s to the modern fervor for artificial intelligence (AI), governance by numbers is making a persuasive return. Could translation from words to numbers, in this context, be possible?