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- Yes. I can parse them just fine after reading a single book called Introduction to Legal Reasoning [1]. I can also autonomously take notes and keep track of a large context using a combination of short and long term memory despite not having any kind of degree let alone experience or a license to practice law.
How do you think people become lawyers and how smart do you think the average lawyer actually is? The problem is that there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages, not that it requires superhuman intelligence to understand.
Even if it were capable of intelligence in the bottom quartile of humanity it would be SO MUCH more useful than it is now because I'd be able run and get something useful out of thousands of models in parallel. As it stands now GPT4 fails miserably at scaling up the kind of reasoning and understanding that even relatively stupid humans are capable of.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Legal-Reasoning-Edward-L...
- There's a well known book on law called "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". And in this book, it more or less calls out this scenario on the first page.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
"The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions, it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community."
I've thought a lot about this because it directly impacts whether you could turn a contract into code. Code is for the most part very deterministic - you can expect that the logic you use will be interpreted in the same way every time given the same inputs. When that isn't the case, it's generally considered a bug.
Law and contracts appear to be deterministic, but are in fact not. Anything that is written into a law or contract is subject to interpretation later. There's no attempt at making it exhaustive because it's not possible, nor is it necessarily desirable. Sometimes contracts contain language that becomes invalid later on, and you don't want to define things too tightly or you'll have to modify the contract non-stop. Sometimes things arise which are not spelled out in the contract and as long as the parties agree, there's no problem. The rules around contracts are a lot more bendable than in code, and "it depends" is quite often the answer to many questions. So is there overlap between code and contracts/law? Certainly. But the deeper you go, the more exceptions that arise.
