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:
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.
>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?
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.)
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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
As a fellow Finn (and a lawyer), super interesting work Elias! And thank you for reporting the inconsistencies you found to Finlex
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.
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
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.
>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?
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.)
> 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.
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.
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
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
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?
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