Patri Friedman

"Code is Law", as @lessig famously said. But for a decade now, people like myself, @balajis, @paulmromer and Tom Bell have been pointing out that Law is Code too: laws are lists of procedural instructions executed by judges and arbitrators as the CPUs.

We amend laws like we patch code; we comment on them, copy them, propose rewrites in the form of Model Codes, have APIs like the UCC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code …), even cross-language APIs (treaties), and we search for opinions on @LexisNexis just like usage examples on @github.

I'm not saying laws are exactly like code or that human law is superior to machine law - I'm sympathetic to @NickSzabo4's eloquent critiques of "human-interpreted wet code" (https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1001670124175163392 …). But there's enough similarity to mine coding practices for legal insights.

So I feel strongly that law should be more fully open-sourced: modularized, forkable, diffable, OSS licensed, kept in searchable repositories along with open (not gated) databases of rulings, and incorporated via reference into city, county, province, and country codes.