Legislators and Coders

Why can't the people who write laws be more like coders?

Anybody who has done legal research knows that the layout of most laws and regulations follow a logic that is largely inaccessible to the public. In fact, if it is tied to logic at all, it is only by the most tenuous of threads.

Instead, I wish that either coders were hired to write laws, or legislators had to learn a bit about coding.

That way, we'd stop seeing silly things like:

• section 43 of the Lanham (trademark) Act is actually 15 USC 1125
• various parts of the patent act state that a particular rule will go into effect 6 months after the ratification of one provision or another

Instead, each particular element of law should come with some header information. The header information would tell you what version the law is, when it was last changed, when it went into effect, etc.

Another benefit would be the inevitable use of some sort of CVS system for all laws. Instead of having to reference other laws that were passed to modify a different section of another code, we'd all be able to take a quick look at the version history and figure out what is going on.

Sorry... bit of a rant there... but I wish the people writing laws had a little experience writing code. After all, the law is no more than a list of 'fuzzy' code statements.