In an entirely different qualitative sense, this post reminded me of the short story by Kafka, Before the Law. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but it’s a really short read:

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html

>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.

I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."

I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?

As a fellow Finn (and a lawyer), super interesting work Elias! And thank you for reporting the inconsistencies you found to Finlex

my favorite quote in this space has always been:

the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more profound, are what i mean by the law.

Man, I hated last year’s clanker-tone, and I hate this one’s too by now. I don’t want to read the word load-bearing ever again.

The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.

I guess this is not meant as a general introduction, but it would have been useful to acknowledge the differences between different legal systems somewhere at the start?

(Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)

Audrey Tang did a lot of things related to this whilst they were Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

> Parliament cannot restate the entire legal corpus each session.

IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that.

Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.

Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting...

Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.

I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!

—