#introduction - I'm a tax #lawprof at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. I'm working with computer scientists and lawyers to design a domain-specific programming language for tax law.
I'm trying to make info beyond the tax code transparent and low-cost too, including about legal hiring, legal academy, study guides, selected code and regs books, etc.
You can see more info about these various projects/publications at https://sites.northwestern.edu/sarahlawsky/websites/
@eriksherman Thank you for asking! The language is called Catala: https://catala-lang.org/
Why domain-specific: the underlying logic of Catala tracks the logic of the code (general rules followed by exceptions). The computer code can thus track the legal code closely, so the law and computer code are more transparent, the computer code is easier to write, and it's easier to change the computer code when the law changes. @DMerigoux et al have a nice discussion here: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03159939
Around the world, private and public organizations use software called legal expert systems to compute taxes. This software must comply with the laws they are designed to implement. As such, a bug or an error in a program that leads to tax miscalculations can have heavy legal and democratic consequences. However, increasing evidence suggests that some legal expert systems may not comply with the law. Moreover, traditional software development processes mean that legal expert systems are difficult to adapt to the continuous flow of new legislation. To prevent further software decay and to reconcile these systems with the growing demand for algorithmic transparency, we argue that there is a need for a new development process for legal expert systems. This new system must be built to comply with the law, in particular the GDPR. It must also respect democratic transparency. For these reasons, we present a solution built by lawyers and computer scientists: Catala, a new programming language coupled with a pair programming development process.
@DMerigoux @sarahlawsky thanks, I'll take a look.
Just thinking about the issue of changing law, I can see some similarities to a topic I recently covered for MIT Technology Review—how information can die and while digitalization can help, it can't stop entropy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/26/1061308/death-of-information-digitization/
Sarah Lawsky
Erik Sherman 
Denis Merigoux
Jason Morris