Law as Code

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• Readings:
  • Sarah Lawsky, Form as Formalization, 16 Ohio State Technology Law Journal 114 (2020).
• Notes: Sarah Lawsky is a tax scholar with a Ph.D. in logic. This is the latest in a series of articles on formalizing tax law. It draws on one of the two major branches of AI—formal methods and deductive reasoning, sometimes called “good old-fashioned AI” (or “GOFAI”)—to draw logically rigorous conclusions about statutes, and discusses the implementation of this this reasoning in tax forms and tax software.
• Questions:
  1. What does it mean to “formalize” a problem?
  2. Is law formal? Can it be? Should it be?
  3. Is there anything about tax law that makes it easier to formalize?
  4. What is the connection between formalization and software?
  5. How do you know whether a formalization is correct?
• Additional Resources:
  • Other articles in Lawsky’s research agenda include Sarah B. Lawsky, A Logic for Statutes, 21 Florida Tax Review 60 (2017); Sarah B. Lawsky, Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 SMU Law Review 535 (2022); Sarah B. Lawsky, Reasoning with Formalized Statutes: The Case of Capital Gains and Losses, 43 Virginia Tax Review 361 (2024). I wrote a short review of Lawsky’s work in James Grimmelmann, When Law is Code, Jotwell: Technology Law (July 31, 2024).