The Quest to Automate Law.
Computational Law is an academic field of research into how law and contracts could be automated in a way that they compute in a self-sufficient way, without human intervention.
Ideally, the law or contract themselves should be executed by a computer. This is what Lexon allows to do.
The intuition that law should be automatable is 360 years old and lies at the heart of computer sciences: the book regarded as the first work of CS, written by Gottfried Leibniz in 1666, proposed as first example for an algorithm to program, a contract law. Leibniz was a professor of law and took part in a law reform. He was also a famous mathematician of the Age of Reason and built calculating machines, even designing a binary one. Consequently, when he anticipated programming he did not think of a better way of bookkeeping first but about computing law. So, the intuition that law has something in common with programming has been with programming from the very beginning. Many lawyers who have knowledge of programming wonder about it today.
It took a long time for the two disciplines to dovetail mainly because logic was for millenia not up to the task of capturing the complexity of legal cases. So much so that logic is not part of the legal education anymore. This was justified until roughly a century ago second- and higher-logic were invented by Frege and Russel. Since then, the tools exist to express complicated circumstances and abstract laws. But Frege had detached logic from natural language and programming languages developed following the formulaic footprint that logicians developed to clearly write algorithms. A step that law never made, it had to stay language-bound as—at least in theory—laws should be readable for everyone concerned. Lexon's contribution is to bring language and logic together again to make programming accessible for non-programmers. This allows for laws, regulations and contracts to be programmed and executed like programs. Asst. prof. Carla Reyes spearheaded using Lexon to write statute.
Lexon makes it possible to make a computer ‘understand’ the logic of a law or an agreement and perform it. It provides what Leibniz was looking for: a way to program law, and contracts – so transparently, that it is frequently called no-code. This empowers lawmakers and will significantly reduce the cost of, and speed up access to justice.
It creates a high synergy with blockchains, making smart contracts readable for all, providing a missing link to the paradigm of trustlessness by alleviating the need to trust the programmers. And importantly, to enable the use of smart contracts in business, it makes smart contracts readable for judges.
But Lexon might find broader application in trustful settings and as a new form of legalese.
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