Legal In Context	=
Placing “legal” in context:	=
1. Legal is a feature (quality), not a product. The purpose is the transaction. Most transactions can be completed without legal questions or intervention. It is the most complex or original ones, or the edge cases that call for legal design, expertise or repair.	=
2. Legal as error-handling - the unhappy path	=
21. Happy path: Legal does nothing. There is already a path. "Happy" is relative: really happy is that the product arrives and the buyer is happy with it. Less happy but still "happy" is that the buyer opens their app and schedules a return of the product. (Still no lawyers injured or used in the process.) (Unhappy path is, one hopes, the exception.)	=
22. Guidance, Maintenance and Repair: What does business want from legal? (Or, what are currently the demands for "legal" intervention? What is the role of legal?)	=
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23. Guard-Rails: What should legal prevent business from doing?	=
3. Governance, democracy and rule of law	=
31. Government as meta-contract manager. A portfolio of portfolios of portfolios.	=
32. Legitimacy - in what language(s) do we decide the rules? - @meggersma: is this a question of jurisdiction or formality of language (the latter perhaps points to complexity). @hazardj - At root, this is the "demotic" issue: shall there be a special literacy test for participation? Shall our instituted governors speak in common languages. Latin in the Church, Ancient Greek in the US, English in Brussels. The same issue arises in somewhat softer form when we discuss "plain language" versus "legal language." It gets super strong when we contemplate expressing rules as code. Is Python or Solidity a requirement of participation in the discussion of what rules govern us?	=
33. Autonomy, Subsidiarity, Law of the Parties - Who decides? Ideally, decisions would be made by the people directly involved. However, there are at least two systemic problems. 1. There are externalities - decisions by a group often affect others who are not part of the group. Shall we have a loud party in our shared apartment may affect neighbors. Shall we burn coal? 2. Imbalances in power or sophistication often leaves one party at the mercy of the other. This is a pervasive problem in contracting where the level of sophistication, the effort needed to read and understand and the asymmetry of power and interest make nonsense of the notion of meeting of the minds, consent, law of the parties. The customer is pidgeon, not a king.	=
A result of both externalities and imbalance is that decisions get moved up the steps of the pyramid of authority. We should not take this as necessarily bad, but distant decision-making has systemic problems. We can hope that greater efficiency and transparency in agreement will allow decisions to move down the pyramid of centralization - to become less fiat rules and more law-of-the-parties at the various steps of the governance pyramid.	=
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4. Documents as legal "reality", "incompleteness"	=
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1077/ Katherina Pistor, Chenggang Xu - Incomplete Law	=
5. Algorithms as "lossy" (shedding context).	=
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https://law.mit.edu/pub/writinginsign/release/1 Megan Ma - Writing in Sign: Code as the Next Contract Language?	=
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.04268.pdf Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Gillian Hadfield - Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment	=
6. Can we do without words? The relationship among words, humans, algorithms and patterns.	=
Lots of materials on this subject. For instance, this brief, incisive one on separating policy and mechanism, relegating AI to mechanism. : https://bford.info/post/2020-11-18-ai-governance/ (The author distinguishes this from "mere" Human-In-The-Loop. The human will be influenced by the machine. Argues that there must be an articulable principle, in words, expressed by humans.)	=