Harry Surden (U Colorado Law) has posted “Computable Law and Artificial Intelligence” (Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence (forthcoming 2024)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article explores the theory and application of “Computable Law”.
‘Computable Law’ is a research area focused on the creation and use of computer models of laws.
What does it mean to model a law computationally? There are a few broad approaches. In one method, researchers begin with traditional, written legal sources of law – such as statutes, contracts, administrative regulations, and court opinions – and identify legal rules that they wish to model. They then aim to ‘translate’ aspects of these legal obligations into comparable sets of organised data, programming instructions, and other forms of expression that computers can easily process. In that approach, one begins with a familiar legal text written in a ‘natural language’ such as English, and then aims to represent qualities of the legal obligations described – such as their structure, meaning, or application – in terms of data, programming rules and other highly organised forms of expression that are easier for computers to handle.
The other approach allows us to express legal obligations as data from the outset. There, one begins with laws expressed as computer data in their initial form – a departure from the written-language through which laws have traditionally been conveyed. An example of this approach can be found in the so-called data-oriented,‘computable contracts’.
These are legal agreements created electronically, whose core terms are expressed largely as data rather than as written paragraphs, and which are frequently used in finance, electronic commerce, cryptocurrency, and other areas.
Through this ‘data-oriented’ method we are still ultimately able to display legal obligations in forms that people can understand, such as in language or visually on a computer screen. However, what is interesting is that the human-understandable versions are typically derived upwards from the underlying data. In other words, one can present to users what appear to be ordinary written legal documents on a screen or on paper, but the contents of those documents are actually generated by processing lower-level computer data. In those cases, it is sometimes best to think of the law’s native data-oriented representation as the authoritative version (or source of ‘ground-truth’) for information about the legal obligations.