I'm surprised the world is not running a system where laws are formally encoded using some DSL that would allow making decision (guilty/not guilty) using formal logic. Perhaps there is not much interest from law making/enforcing parties for this either.

That's a common fantasy of developers who haven't touched grass in a while.

You’d also probably be surprised about how subjective and unevenly applied the law is… by design, to allow appropriate outcomes and discretion.

Edit: Consider the following words included in law.

“reasonable” “reckless” “due care”

I don't think this is where the problem lies. If you kill someone with intent, it's murder. But the whole system needs to prove that you killed someone with intent beyond a reasonable doubt, and a DSL will not help you there.

Have you actually tried reading a single law? If you have, have you tried to write just one article in formal logic?

Certain laws, like parts of tax law may be possible to turn into code, like percentages and deadlines, but even those often carry natural language conditions that can't be evaluated so easily. Seriously, try it.

Law is not 100% exact. For instance, the age of consent in Spain it's 16, and you are adult by 19. You and a group of people had sex with a 15 yo. Your friends are well over 20 (24, 25...), and OFC trialed and jailed. But you, being almost close in maturity to that girl, (and noticed by psychologysts testing both the girl's mindset and yours ) can have the charges perfectly dropped.

Ditto with alcohol laws -18 there-. Selling a cyder to a 17 + 11 months guy would have a much smaller fine than a hard liquor to a 14yo.

The reverse it's true, too. 14yo are the minimum age to be legally punished. If you are 13 and barely stole some $20 Steam card -if any- you just got sentenced to spend your formative years in a juvenile center.

But, if you are 13yo gang member and you have a longass list of both petty and hard crimes and the last one has been a bloody crime with serious injuries or homicide... you can be sent as an exception to an adult prison because your mentality and mindset are not the ones from the early teens.

Especially if your body it's really developed for your age and you basically commanded mini-clans as the ones you can see in Ireland, Italy and the like. When you can smack down adults at age 13 and even ilegally drive a car, the Spanish constitution wont save you. Ultimately you must -and can- be trialed as an adult but also be able to finish the mandatory education years until you hit 16. Not easy, of course, but sending these kind of people to juvenile centers just generates more thugs than anything else.

If this is difficult for humans, imagine that for software with exact constraints.

Maybe we should go further and use some DSL to speak with each other in the first place? Would def make everything straight and eliminate ambiguity!