normalized_legal_drafting_query_method.md

date	tags
2020-06-15	paper

Normalized legal drafting and the Query method (Allen, 1978)

1978 paper by Layman E. Allen: Normalized legal drafting and the Query method.

Precursor to rules as code, computational contracts etc. "Normalized" legal document à la Allen ≈ with the goal "Improve communication among humans".

Purpose

Aims to fix unintended syntactic ambiguity, imprecision, confusing turn of phrase or just plain incorrect meaning. (There are also <advantages_of_imprecision>, which this method would keep.)

Normalization

(Manually) convert text into two equivalent formats:

1. Itemized list, using line breaks and explicit tokens such as 1. and a)

2. Human-readable visual diagram. For istance, if a then b is expressed as

   >─┐
     a
     │
     ˅
     b
   

Advantages:

• Exposes ambiguity and imprecision, when you need to put things in parallel and be explicit about what is left unsaid.
• Visual graph shows more clearly different ways of reaching a state, etc.

Query method

Method for humans to learn to draft in the normalized style.

TODO: read that part of paper.