I worked for a company pre-LLMs that analyzed laws and regulations in order to answer questions about financial transaction legality and reporting requirements. One problem that came up frequently is that the rules governments make don't have to be consistent. There are conflicts, some quite significant. The best we could do was make them visible and escalate to a human.

It would be interesting to require laws to be compilable. Charles Stross wrote a couple of books that include that idea.

In theory "impossibility" is a defense to most crimes.

In practice you usually get screwed in one of the following ways: a) the law makes it impossible to do X without breaking the law, even though X is a normal thing and neither law was supposed to be a total ban on X, but you could comply by not doing X at all, b) the inconsistent laws are imposed by different jurisdictions and then they each insist you follow theirs, often a special case of the first one where X is "be in two different jurisdictions" but sometimes the even stupider one where a jurisdiction demands that you follow its laws even when you're not in it, c) it's impossible for you to follow both laws at once so you followed only one of them and then they decide after the fact that you should have followed only the other one.

What are the books in particular? I liked Accelerando and was intrigued by the reputation markets mentioned.

My understanding is that consistency is explicitly not a goal of the American legal system.

Laws are designed to give law enforcement latitude to pursue the charges they seem fit, subject to the taste of a judge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it