Law can be significantly improved through technological innovation but, at its heart, does not lend itself to mechanical application.

By its nature, the law seeks to regulate human affairs, which can have as many variations as there are people, thoughts, and actions. That is, law works with what is basically an infinite set of potential variations.

In trying to define what is right and what is wrong, what is just and unjust, the law adopts rules and principles to attempt to make sense of the common cases that arise. But there will always be an exceptional case waiting around the corner.

That is why judge-made law lies at the core of law. It deals with issues as they arise case by case in an individualized setting. When judges write opinions, they set precedents to help guide future decisions. The precedents in themselves embody sets of rules or principles as they applied to a particular set of facts. When new facts arise, the law can apply the same principles or can distinguish the new facts and declare a variant outcome based on such facts. It is a highly customized system that can't be systematized unless and until human conduct can be systematized - that is, it never can be made predictable except insofar as it concerns recurring types of situations, meaning that exceptions will always arise.

When legislatures try to systematize law, they do so through statutes. These are authoritative pronouncements of law that say, in effect, "for this type of issue, here is what the law will be."

Statutes are so general, though, that courts need to interpret them as they apply to individual situations that may arise under them. This leads right back to the case-by-case approach of judge-made law.

Statutes also have implementing regulations by which they are clarified and applied to detailed situations. Just try to read through the Code of Federal Regulations sometime. You will find a maze of detail so individualized that no one would possibly want to waste time trying to systematize. Again, the human factor looms large. Tax regulations might say that this or that constitutes taxable income. But some lobbyist has managed to get Congress to inject bizarre exceptions. Again, though, the real problem is how any given regulation applies to real-world facts. These come with infinite variations and lead right back to the case-by-case type of system found in courts - thus, nearly every administrative agency has a corresponding court (the Tax Court, for instance).

When David Dudley Field tried to simplify law in the 1870s in California, he got the California legislature to adopt the Field Codes. These were complete restatements of all the judge-made law then extant in California, all set forth in simply-worded statutes, drafted by the brightest people with the express intention of making the law understandable to lay people. It was a grand experiment in legal simplification. What happened? The judges began interpreting the statutes case-by-case, had to decide how the new "simple" language related to the older more complex language in evaluating the continuing worth of the older precedents, and finally had to decide whether the legislature did or did not intend to change the law from what it was before in adopting the new language in any given area. By the time the courts went through that maze, and then had to apply the simple statutes to many sets of complex facts that inevitably arose in real life, they had managed to promulgate a new body of judge-made law that was more complicated than ever. The Field Code, then, turned out to be one of the world's biggest belly flops - it began with a great flourish and ended up a humiliating embarrassment.

The same with form contracts - it all turns on customization. If you want to take an elegantly worded contract and just sign it without considering how it might apply to your deal, you are asking for trouble.

Law also has innumerable localized variations. There is municipal law (that varies with each city or town), state law (that varies with each state), federal law (that varies with each nation), and international law. Different scenarios can potentially implicate laws from one or more of these disparate levels at the same time. Who decides which law applies in a complex fact pattern where activities might have occurred in multiple states or nations? Or how the law of one region may or may not be qualitatively better than the law of another? Any coding system would need to make such determinations.

That all said, if someone can figure out how to put all this in code in any way that is meaningful, it will be one of the most stunning accomplishments ever.

The underlying article is a good read. The idea of reducing the overall body of law to code, though, is pretty fantastic, in my judgment.