Law is a critical tool that humans have created to assist them in managing complex social interactions. Computational Law holds the potential to significantly enhance our capacity to express and manage legal complexity, and a number of advantages can result from restating public and private legal rules in computable form. Capturing that potential depends in part on the approaches taken to automation. One set of choices involves whether to translate directly into code from existing natural language statements of laws, regulations and contracts or whether to step back, envision the basic structure underlying those statements and build a software approach that reflects that structure in a code-native manner. We argue that many advantages can flow from the second approach, and we present a specific use case of a simplified insurance policy as an example of this approach. Large language models may assist in this process, but are not yet a replacement for a code-native utility.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘A complexity science approach to law and governance’.

法律是人类创造的帮助他们管理复杂社会互动的重要工具。计算法有可能显着增强我们表达和管理法律复杂性的能力，并且以可计算的形式重述公共和私人法律规则可以带来许多优势。捕捉这种潜力部分取决于自动化所采用的方法。一组选择涉及是否将法律、法规和合同的现有自然语言声明直接翻译为代码，或者是否退后一步，设想这些声明背后的基本结构并构建一种以代码本机方式反映该结构的软件方法。我们认为第二种方法可以带来许多优势，并且我们提出了简化保险单的具体用例作为这种方法的示例。大型语言模型可能有助于此过程，但尚未取代代码本机实用程序。

本文是主题“法律和治理的复杂性科学方法”的一部分。