AI & Law: Catala Programming Language For Law-As-Code
by Dr. Lance B. Eliot
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Key briefing points about this article:
- There is an ongoing debate about the law-as-code confabulation
- Some lean toward low-code or no-code options
- Others emphasize the importance of robust full-code programming capabilities
- Catala is a newer programming language devised for the law-as-code ambitions
- Features include compiling to a generic lambda calculus
Introduction
Take a look at just about any legal news media posting these days and you’ll inevitably see a reference to the law as code. The assertion that law is code has become nearly ubiquitous.
Why so?
Well, the overarching notion of law as code is that the law can be construed as a form of programming code. The text of the law is ostensibly regarded as a set of rules that can be summarily codified into a program or algorithm. If that is so, we can readily pour the law…
