Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens’ daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm.
The current state of affairs is concerning: in many cases, human-critical systems are implemented using technology that is several decades old, resulting in e.g. the IRS relying on assembly code from the 60s or its French counterpart relying on a home-made language from the 90s with tens of thousands of global variables. For institutions stuck with this unfortunate status quo, consequences are many: legacy systems cannot be evolved, in spite of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “modernization” budgets; mistakes are made and rarely noticed; automatic analyses remain elusive, meaning policymakers are “flying dark”; and in the worst case, as happened with the French military pay computation, families are on the verge of bankruptcy because of incorrect code. In recent years, the programming languages community has begun to tackle the problem of creating transparent, user-friendly, and accountable systems that model, operate within or interface with legal domains and problems.
This will be the third annual meeting of the Workshop on Programming Languages and the Law. Past workshops included participants from around the world, drawing from both academia and industry. Presentations included work on languages for legal domains, verification tools for legal expert systems, and emerging platforms and technologies like smart contracts. This year, we will expand the scope of the workshop to explicitly include any application of programming languages, software engineering, or formal methods to law or policy.