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:
It's part of a novel, so it has a larger context. The parable is not intended for you, the reader, but for the protagonist of the novel Josef K., who is spending time in a futile effort. I'd say it's basically about futility of seeking unattainable answers, and frustration. But it's probably not meant to be 100% understood, as Josef K. is a confused character full of doubts (like Kafka's characters tend to be), the purpose of the parable is not to dispel his doubts but to entrap him more in the frustration.
Having worked a large bureaucracy, when we'd sometimes get into some catch 22, I used to quote the line "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything" sometimes to a friend who also knew the short story, and we'd laugh.
Yes I thought at the start it was about how our expectations of how the law works are at odds with the reality
So the gatekeeper is the system keeping us from Justice - mostly money, but also other less tangible barriers. In theory, everyone gets a lawyer, in practice some people can afford expensive ones.
The end twist makes me think it's about an individual attempt to learn and understand the law, but I'm not sure what the inner gatekeepers would represent there.
Something about how we want to understand The Law, capital letters, but then there's only systems we make ourselves and understand ourselves would feel properly Kafka, I suppose. But you think that would be mapped to journeying towards some kind of Law?
Keep in mind that the story is actually embedded in Kafka's "The Trial", and discussed by two characters within that story, who have very different views of its meaning.
I think it is very deliberately written to be impossible to "understand". If you think you have found its clear and unambiguous meaning, you're wrong.
Like the other replies, I also didn't understand it, so I asked Gemini. Forgive my use of AI, but I can't seem to summarize it any better.
> Permission is a Trap: The gatekeeper never uses physical force. The man fails because he accepts the psychological deterrence. He waits for external approval instead of acting.
> Systems are Designed to Stall: Bureaucracy exists to keep individuals waiting. Complying with arbitrary rules and being infinitely patient yields absolutely zero results.
> Your Path is Individual: The gate was made only for this specific man. By deferring to authority, he surrendered an opportunity tailored entirely to him.
> Action Over Compliance: The story is a warning against passive obedience. The system will gladly let you sit outside and rot if you never force the issue.
I don't understand #3, but the rest, especially #4 really ring true.
Man, I hated last year’s clanker-tone, and I hate this one’s too by now. I don’t want to read the word load-bearing ever again.
The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.
I get it, it's not ideal. Yet there is no one else doing this work so I put effort where I think it's most neglected - which isn't fully refined prose, imo.
The approach I take is that every law should expire after a standard, unchangeable time - probably several terms of Congress, say 6 years to account for one full Senate turnover.
Congress can just repass verbatim old laws if they wish - its already written and can be a simple, fast vote. Or we can have debate over outdated provisions like we should have.
Do you re-read the source code for your keyboard drivers each time you boot up the PC? If not, how can you as a mere mortal be expected to understand if some keys still work the same as yesterday?
Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.
It would work just like people work on docs without revision control:
* Laws of the Land
* Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Final 2
* Copy of Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29 with 11 o' clock amendments
It's a bad idea, there's a reason we don't recommit the whole repo every time we make code changes (any more).
that would slow down the process considerably. it would also not be of much use to the professionals, which i guess make up the majority of those involved most of the time, and so, i guess, would not have much support.
IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder
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.)
>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.
I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."
I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?
European Convention on Human Rights, Article 7: "No punishment without law"
1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act
or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or
international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier
penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal
offence was committed.
This doesn't preclude "beneficial" retroactivity: e.g. if some act you're currently incarcerated for is declared legal henceforth (or deserves less maximum jail time that you've already served), then you should be released.
One flavor is for stating something already very consensual in the concerned community. That gives credits to law corpus as a source of justice, so people can somehow be accustomed that law is there to foster social justice through clarified terms visible by all. As opposed to unpredictable judgment of any random citizen along their mindset of the moment.
Then they are laws to throw made up arcana on how laws work. Citizen are still supposed to believe that laws in the end are balanced systems taking many things into account, so mere citizen won't have time, interest, skill and talent to call law by themselves. While they need specialists as middle man, they can still be pretended to be grounded on accumulated wisdom of common sense and consensual underlying basis.
There are also laws, there are their for serving a specific small class in the population, and favor their interest agaisnt all others. As they are well enshrined in the larger boilerplate corpus, there is no way to distinguish them from the others. Well, sometime of course they can be downright clear about establishing de facto inequalities to serve these interests. But they can just as well be thrown in a more diffuse way. Not all law maker are equally subtle of course.
This is not a closed set, many other flavors can be identified, like, "put my name of the glorious me in the title of this law everyone and its dog will have to deal with on daily basis".
Ah, and I almost forgot the flavor that make the most sense to talk about here. Make sure you have enough laws on every matter and the rest to be able to jugulate any layman who is annoying for the dominant class. Capital sentence is not indispensable, it's enough to have enough laws so basically anyone is de facto unable to not be guilty of many things, or at least can be prosecuted until they bind to the "morale order", or suicide.
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!
(My impression: various approaches; mostly academic; some small companies in the space; judging from a loose assessment wrt my career choices as a freelancer: no real business opportunity yet)
A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.
The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!
Patents are a much smaller space than the vast legal one in the article, so it's tractable for a human. The raw DSL spec length is roughly comparable to Lua or Go. It's a genuine grammar, with types and an AST; but no conditionals, control flow, expressions, etc. like a regular programming language.
A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.
Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.
The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.
I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...
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
An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
Thanks for the interesting read. But, I have to say, I didn't understand it at all.
It's part of a novel, so it has a larger context. The parable is not intended for you, the reader, but for the protagonist of the novel Josef K., who is spending time in a futile effort. I'd say it's basically about futility of seeking unattainable answers, and frustration. But it's probably not meant to be 100% understood, as Josef K. is a confused character full of doubts (like Kafka's characters tend to be), the purpose of the parable is not to dispel his doubts but to entrap him more in the frustration.
Having worked a large bureaucracy, when we'd sometimes get into some catch 22, I used to quote the line "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything" sometimes to a friend who also knew the short story, and we'd laugh.
Yes I thought at the start it was about how our expectations of how the law works are at odds with the reality
So the gatekeeper is the system keeping us from Justice - mostly money, but also other less tangible barriers. In theory, everyone gets a lawyer, in practice some people can afford expensive ones.
Then the end twist got me confused.
The end twist makes me think it's about an individual attempt to learn and understand the law, but I'm not sure what the inner gatekeepers would represent there.
Something about how we want to understand The Law, capital letters, but then there's only systems we make ourselves and understand ourselves would feel properly Kafka, I suppose. But you think that would be mapped to journeying towards some kind of Law?
Excercising your rights is a duty, responsibility and experience that is individual to everyone.
Yes, it was very kafkaesque. (I also didn't get it.)
Keep in mind that the story is actually embedded in Kafka's "The Trial", and discussed by two characters within that story, who have very different views of its meaning.
I think it is very deliberately written to be impossible to "understand". If you think you have found its clear and unambiguous meaning, you're wrong.
Like the other replies, I also didn't understand it, so I asked Gemini. Forgive my use of AI, but I can't seem to summarize it any better.
> Permission is a Trap: The gatekeeper never uses physical force. The man fails because he accepts the psychological deterrence. He waits for external approval instead of acting.
> Systems are Designed to Stall: Bureaucracy exists to keep individuals waiting. Complying with arbitrary rules and being infinitely patient yields absolutely zero results.
> Your Path is Individual: The gate was made only for this specific man. By deferring to authority, he surrendered an opportunity tailored entirely to him.
> Action Over Compliance: The story is a warning against passive obedience. The system will gladly let you sit outside and rot if you never force the issue.
I don't understand #3, but the rest, especially #4 really ring true.
Here is a longer article on it:
https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.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.
As a fellow Finn (and a lawyer), super interesting work Elias! And thank you for reporting the inconsistencies you found to Finlex
Man, I hated last year’s clanker-tone, and I hate this one’s too by now. I don’t want to read the word load-bearing ever again.
The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.
I get it, it's not ideal. Yet there is no one else doing this work so I put effort where I think it's most neglected - which isn't fully refined prose, imo.
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.
I feel this sentiment. I think its a good one.
The approach I take is that every law should expire after a standard, unchangeable time - probably several terms of Congress, say 6 years to account for one full Senate turnover.
Congress can just repass verbatim old laws if they wish - its already written and can be a simple, fast vote. Or we can have debate over outdated provisions like we should have.
Do you re-read the source code for your keyboard drivers each time you boot up the PC? If not, how can you as a mere mortal be expected to understand if some keys still work the same as yesterday?
How would it work though?
Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.
It would work just like people work on docs without revision control:
It's a bad idea, there's a reason we don't recommit the whole repo every time we make code changes (any more).that would slow down the process considerably. it would also not be of much use to the professionals, which i guess make up the majority of those involved most of the time, and so, i guess, would not have much support.
IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder
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.)
Fair point. I've added a clarification that the structural constraint holds across civil law, common law, and hybrid systems. Thanks.
>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.
I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."
I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?
If doesn't matter much for this kind of scenario.
Laws come in multiple flavor.
One flavor is for stating something already very consensual in the concerned community. That gives credits to law corpus as a source of justice, so people can somehow be accustomed that law is there to foster social justice through clarified terms visible by all. As opposed to unpredictable judgment of any random citizen along their mindset of the moment.
Then they are laws to throw made up arcana on how laws work. Citizen are still supposed to believe that laws in the end are balanced systems taking many things into account, so mere citizen won't have time, interest, skill and talent to call law by themselves. While they need specialists as middle man, they can still be pretended to be grounded on accumulated wisdom of common sense and consensual underlying basis.
There are also laws, there are their for serving a specific small class in the population, and favor their interest agaisnt all others. As they are well enshrined in the larger boilerplate corpus, there is no way to distinguish them from the others. Well, sometime of course they can be downright clear about establishing de facto inequalities to serve these interests. But they can just as well be thrown in a more diffuse way. Not all law maker are equally subtle of course.
This is not a closed set, many other flavors can be identified, like, "put my name of the glorious me in the title of this law everyone and its dog will have to deal with on daily basis".
Ah, and I almost forgot the flavor that make the most sense to talk about here. Make sure you have enough laws on every matter and the rest to be able to jugulate any layman who is annoying for the dominant class. Capital sentence is not indispensable, it's enough to have enough laws so basically anyone is de facto unable to not be guilty of many things, or at least can be prosecuted until they bind to the "morale order", or suicide.
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!
> Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents.
at that point why not just use something precise like a programming language? have there been efforts in that direction? genuine questions
Yes (not patents in particular).
The name is "law as code".
(My impression: various approaches; mostly academic; some small companies in the space; judging from a loose assessment wrt my career choices as a freelancer: no real business opportunity yet)
I have no idea.
A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.
The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!
Interesting indeed! What have you learned from the patent space and what kinds of questions can you answer after perhaps solving that domain?
Patents are a much smaller space than the vast legal one in the article, so it's tractable for a human. The raw DSL spec length is roughly comparable to Lua or Go. It's a genuine grammar, with types and an AST; but no conditionals, control flow, expressions, etc. like a regular programming language.
A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.
Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.
The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.
I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...
—