Legal Quanta: A Mathematical Romance of Many Dimensions

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law

“Caligula posted the tax laws in such fine print and so high that his subjects could not read them . . . . That’s not a good idea, we can all agree. How can citizens comply with what they can’t see? And how can anyone assess the tax collector’s exercise of power in that setting?

Artificial intelligence as law:Presidential address to the seventeenth international conference on artificial intelligence and law

Information technology is so ubiquitous and AI's progress so inspiring that also legal professionals experience its benefits and have high expectations. At the same time, the powers of AI have been rising so strongly that it is no longer obvious that AI applications (whether in the law or elsewhere) help promoting a good society; in fact they are sometimes harmful. Hence many argue that safeguards are needed for AI to be trustworthy, social, responsible, humane, ethical. In short: AI should be good for us. But how to establish proper safeguards for AI? One strong answer readily available is: consider the problems and solutions studied in AI & Law. AI & Law has worked on the design of social, explainable, responsible AI aligned with human values for decades already, AI & Law addresses the hardest problems across the breadth of AI (in reasoning, knowledge, learning and language), and AI & Law inspires new solutions (argumentation, schemes and norms, rules and cases, interpretation). It is argued that the study of AI as Law supports the development of an AI that is good for us, making AI & Law more relevant than ever

Experience report: implementing a real-world, medium-sized program derived from a legislative specification

International audienceImplementing computer programs from legislative specifications has been a longstanding academic endeavor. However, few of these experiments has so far sought to replicate a computer program that is already in production in public administration; most of them have created new programs or formalizations that cover sections of the law not previously automatically enforced by public administration. A somewhat dated but accurate state of the artof the use of legal expert systems in government agencies was compiled by Oskamp (2002). Building on the work around the Catala domain-specific language, we have chosen to engage in an exercise of replication of the existing IT system that computes the French housing benefits (and various other benefits) within the CNAF administrative agency, CRISTAL. More general context and main non-technical findings of this replication exercise can be found in a companion paper; this presentation will focus on the challenges and lessons learned about the programming act itself, in an effort of consolidation of knowledge for this line of research