Law as algebra

fbonsignore_at_beethoven.com
Date: 03/05/05 

Date: 5 Mar 2005 11:01:43 -0800

Ultimately the essence of law is to act as an algebraic operation,
linking the set of all human acts to the set composed of two values,
not guilty and guilty, set which can then be further expanded by
including no contest in some cases, and compensations and punishments
as expansions of the values not guilty and guilty. The space on whichh
this operation is defined, however abstract,
is the set of all judgements of value or simply values.

Since this domain is uncountable infinite, the function of judges is,
following the metaphor, to act as closures, to turn acts through laws
into value values (inevitable pun). By applying this conception to the
extreme any law system can be formalized and computed, leaving to
humans, the most exquisite computers yet, to perform the closures. Of
course, the need to classify and categorize what is by definition a
fuzzy domain, that of acts, prevents us from truly formalizing and
applying mechanically this view, particularly since circumstances are
an important element in the definition of acts. This may point to a
critic to current law systems from the notion that acts, or criminal
acts, are more or less well defined or granulated. Ideally, an act
would be named and several subacts attached to the definition before
linking it to punishments and compensations by law, in other words,
acts (not necessarily *criminal* acts, since criminal is ust a tag
denoting the link act->punishment), can be seen as a cross product of
elementary acts where every possible circumstance is crossed to arrive
in the extreme to the most detailed description of acts, before
submitting them to the `law computer`, to yield irom the input the
output of punishments and compensations.

Law systems can then be seen as the set of transformations between acts
and punishments (compensation would be negative punishments) from the
infinite set of all possible relations of acts to punishments. From
this it is implied that law systems can be more or less complete in
several senses, the more complete the more difficult to apply in real
life. It also points to the (im)possibility of `criticizing` a law
system by minimizing social costs or benefits of the application of a
particular law set by calculating for given domain and codomain sets
the expected value of punishments. In other words, several aspect of a
law system can in abstract be investigated formally to achieve optima
in a sort of equation solving to meet social criteria.

For instance, given a well defined set of acts, probabilistic
distributions of their occurrence, plus estimations of the social cost
(result) of those acts, the set of punishments and their cost
(considering opportunity costs), several law systems (judging
operation) can be tested to find which of them maximizes or minimizes
social value or other variables. This may even be done automatically by
a search algorithm which would perform a search in the set of possible
rules to attach acts to punishments in a (sub)optimal way. Agenetic
algorith with suitable semantics would be adequate. (If this terminal
is being hacked, while I finish writing what I write may have been
published elsewhere.... internet is terra incognita)

Fabrizio J Bonsignore, now Danilo J Bonsignore

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