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Converting Laws to Programs

By Esther Shein
Communications of the ACM, January 2022, Vol. 65 No. 1, Pages 15-16
10.1145/3495564
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legal scales and information table, illustration — Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Shutterstock

Sometimes the intricacies of tax laws are mind-boggling, even to lawyers. Sarah Lawsky, a law professor at Northwestern University School of Law and Jonathan Protzenko, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, were working to translate Section 121 of the U.S. Tax Code, which stipulates how much a taxpayer can deduct from their income taxes from the profit of the sale of a home, into programmable code.

They found themselves stumped, because while the law stipulates a profit on the first $250,000 of a home sale is not to be taxed, "there's like nine layers of exceptions," including whether a person served in the military or is married, or if a spouse is deceased, Protzenko says.

Comments

Adam Wyner

December 21, 2021 04:22

It is very welcome to see a discussion in the ACM about artificial intelligence/computer science applied to law. Applications to tax go all the way back to 1977 with the Taxman system and subsequent work:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1340132

Further work on AI and Law can be found on the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law:

http://www.iaail.org/

and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Law:

https://www.springer.com/journal/10506

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