Formal Methods and Law - Computational Analysis of Code-Based Legal Systems

Watch a keynote lecture from POPL'18 exploring the application of formal methods and logic to legal analysis, particularly focusing on code-based law versus common law. Discover how computational law and rule-based approaches can be used to formalize and analyze complex regulatory systems like U.S. federal tax law. Learn about the potential of default logic for identifying drafting errors, structural ambiguities, and possible tax avoidance strategies in legal codes. Understand why certain types of regulation-heavy law are more suitable for computational analysis compared to common law, which faces different challenges related to term ambiguity and outcome prediction. Examine how this approach differs from big data methods in legal analysis, offering a structured framework for understanding and improving legal systems through formal methods.