📑Law as Code

Although paper-based legal frameworks are inherently a form of code, their potential applications become boundless when integrated with modern technology and embraced as code-based systems.

Code-based law presents a range of possibilities, such as publicly available legal structures that feature change tracking, code-based regulations that can be employed by both authorities and corporations on the same platform, and code-based legal procedures that are routed automatically based on legal activity or rulings.

To this end, we propose the publishing of model legislation, legal frameworks, and regulations, with availability for reference on platforms like Github that feature change tracking. Through this approach, future jurisdictions can effortlessly adopt these frameworks by reference, making them reusable and compatible across sovereign jurisdictions worldwide.

“If you look at what a legal system or institution is, it’s very much like code. It’s information, it’s processes. And what we see with software is that with code-like things, there’s incredible power that can happen from open sourcing them, from copying the best code from place to place from not trying to rewrite an operating system yourself every time, from having a world where you have all of these different components, all these different libraries that people around the world are coordinating on building, and when you want to go make an app or a website, you don’t start from scratch. You grab all of these modules. And I think that law can and should work the same way. We can have all these different legal modules for all these different types of law that are customized for different purposes. And if you’re making a jurisdiction, rather than using the laws that you happened to grow up with, that were imposed by some random colonial power a hundred years ago, you actually say, ‘hey what are the best laws for my culture, for the industries that locate here, what works the best, and then put it together.”

- Patri Friedman