For example, lets take the purpose limitation principle of the GDPR [Article 5(1)(b)]. It states that personal data must be ‘collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes.’ So then naturally, one asks what is purpose really? What does ‘specified’ mean in practice? What is considered as ‘legitimate”? Then I had to look up research on purpose, find a whole PhD thesis dedicated for purpose with meaning and everything. Understanding purposes as actions vs labels. This helped me to break down concepts into small chunks for technical specification. GDPR further specifies that controllers have a “duty” for instance to inform data subjects when purposes change. What is duty really? is it an action, a relationship? Then finding whole PhD dedicated to duties and obligations. As someone who is designing systems that can enforce these regulations, this questions helped me to bridge the gap between my technical background and the legal concepts I was being introduced to.

English isn’t my native language, which might be why I obsess over exact meanings. I always fear that may be I am missing something crucial. I also understand that the law is intentionally written to allow for broad interpretations. But then, what does “broad” actually mean? How broad is too broad? At what point does flexibility become vagueness? Obviously, it’s probably not vague for a legal expert. However, if you are trying to translate legal requirement into code, for making binary decisions, that vagueness becomes a sort of obstacle. But then how are we suppose to bridge code and law? Because not every development team will have a lawyer. Which is why we need interdisciplinary teams these days, which I guess we have and are emerging. So this is not a criticism but me thinking out loud.

I sometimes wonder, what if in the distant future, we would be writing law from code instead of code from law. It’s a scary thought but also may be fascinating. We would have to evolve into a society without ambiguity, vagueness, everything that makes us human. It will be a robotic society. Our humanness will be gone. Reminds me of the movie, Equilibrium, where emotions are outlawed. I think law derived from code might work in that society. or may be not. I mean eventually, we will have enough data to generate law from code. This also reminds me the TV series, Foundation, no matter how predictable we become there will always be that one outlier. But in Foundation, Seldon’s psycho history could predict the future of entire civilizations. However, it couldn’t account for the Mule, a single unpredictable individual who broke the whole model. What if we designed models that accounted for the outlier? I digress.

I am making the assumption that to write law from code, we have to be predictable. But laws are written based on values and principles of what we think should be and not what currently is. I imagine, code based law would have to start from some sort of enforceable patterns. So I assumed that either we become predictable or we only get laws that govern our predictability. It’s an assumption. So law from code, a bane of our existence or a hope for survival? The whole point I am making is that I enjoyed asking “what does it mean?”. Because it helped me break down concepts into small chunks that I relate to code. Also because these concepts are fascinating and really not limited to the legal domain.