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Unlike software, legal bugs are often by design.


This. I was working with a startup and on my first day onsite, I was sat next to the company lawyer. He told me he had just finished up a contract that was riddled with landmines. He seemed so proud of himself.

At a later point when renegotiating, I was given one of these dangerous contracts to sign. When I brought to light my concerns, said lawyer set up a face to face with me. His first words were, "If you weren't an engineer, you would have made a good lawyer."

Boggles the mind.


Somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously: I wish that laws and changes to them were organized and published like repos and pull requests on github.

It'd be such a lead forward in transparency if 'bugs' (loopholes), authors, and proposed changes were out in the open -- and the history and reasoning behind them equally public.

In theory I think this is the way many countries legal systems already work: the case law and regulations are technically public. But it's generally only accessible (in both the sense of retrieval, and also in the sense of understanding the language) to subject experts.


Software bugs and proposed changes _are_ accessible only to subject experts, or people keen enough wrt. software to be of above average technological competence.

The only difference is, were the subject matter experts in the domain where GitHub and the likes rule.

At least where I live, court records are accessible to the lay person (after clearing some hurdles). Will anyone look at them aside from lawyers and law students? Probably not...

Greater transparency in lawmaking and governance is always a good thing, though, and most government's don't achieve it to any great extent.




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