LabPlus: Better Rules for Government Discovery Report

Nadia Webster – NZ Digital Government

The rather dry title of this post belies the importance and interest of its content. Lots of people have spotted that laws are systems of rules, computer code is systems of rules and that somehow these two fact should illuminate each other. Quite how that should happen is much less clear. Ideas have ranged from developing systems to turn law into code to adapting software testing tools to check legislative compliance. This post records an experiment with a different approach again, exploring the possibility of creating legislative rules in a way which is designed to make them machine consumable. That’s an approach with some really interesting possibilities, but also some very deep challenges. As John Sheridan has put it, law is deeply intertwingled: the meaning of legislation is only partly conveyed by the words of a specific measure, which means that transcoding the literal letter of the law will never be enough. And beyond that again, the process of delivering and experiencing a service based on a particular set of legal rules will include a whole set of rules and norms which are not themselves captured in law.

That makes it sensible to start, as the work by the New Zealand government reported here has done, with exploratory thinking, rather than jumping too quickly to assumptions about the best approach.  The recommendations for areas to investigate further set out in their full report are an excellent set of questions, which will be of interest to governments round the world.

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