When it comes to legal dramas, almost every episode rests on a knife-edge of subjective argument and opinion. The law itself is merely the backdrop against which the human drama plays out. Will the jury lean this way or that? The law itself provides no clue, which is the basis of the drama, of course.
On this evidence, it’s easy to imagine that the law is just as unpredictable as the irrational humans who implement, debate and challenge it. Certainly, in some areas, subjective opinion plays a huge role.
But there is another aspect of the law that is quite different. So-called computational law involves ideas that are well defined and situations that do not generally require human judgment. For example, certain areas of tax law. In these areas “law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm,” says Denis Merigoux and Nikolas Chataing at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in Paris, along with Jonathan Protzenko at Microsoft Research in the U.S.
