A Legal Object Model

 

If you wanted to make deep, permanent progress on problems of law and governance, a good point of entry would be the "object model" of the legal world.  

Legal "reality" consists largely of records - documents, invoices, database entries, emails and the like.  These records have an implied object model, much of it shared widely, even globally, via legal theory, laws, legal writing, law schools, forms, model documents, precedents, software,  and e-commerce.

This object model can be made visible, operational, harmonized, and free, to the benefit of legal systems’ “users,” their citizens, businesses, regulators and judges.  The transformation can begin locally, in small groups or industry verticals, or broadly.   Where used, it can make transacting and governance more certain, quick, transparent, decentralized, robust, readable and democratic.  Fulfilling important objectives of legal systems, and assumptions of economics and other theories.

 

An object model of the legal world would start with some primitives:

·       Persons

• Things
• Places
• Time
• Forms

These “objects” are connected to form Events.  Events in a legal system are records - documents, receipts, filings, signatures, stamps, checks, payment receipts, and the like.  Forms and their uses (precedents) are archetype Events on which future uses can be based.  

 

Together these are a "graph."  Like Twitter, Facebook and those wiggly-bubble diagrams that show connections.   Graph is a well-developed idea, with tools and mathematics.

Currently, Events are recorded in a great variety of formats.  Not only do different companies and agencies use different systems, but a single institution may use dozens of different object models internally.  This is largely the result of history.   In the early days of computing, software addressed particular problems, in ways that were thought optimal for the particular problem.  Because software was written first for the most acute needs of the largest institutions, many important pieces of transacting infrastructure are run on idiosyncratic object models.  Similarly, commercial software solved important problems but, like all intermediaries, had to avoid fully solving their customers' problems.  The variety of solutions is a major impediment to interoperability.

The shared ledger movement provides an alternative, and driving force for change.  The most important point of that movement may be standardization.  In other words, Bitcoin introduced open source and open standards to the C-Suite.  

 

 

The Object Model:

 

Reiterating the primitives mentioned above:

• Persons
• Things
• Places
• Time
• Forms

From these spring other objects - categories of Persons, Things, Places, and Forms, and individual instances of each of them.  The primitives and all other objects are expressed as "Records".  It is possible to use a single format of Record for all nodes in the graph.

The primitives and their derivatives are connected as "Events." Events are reified in legal systems as "documents" and similar records.  Documents increment the relationships of Persons to one another and to Things.  They are more or less precisely situated in space and time.  Documents can be very easily automated as nodes in the graph, and models of documents already exist, as forms or precedents, for all types of Events.  Current systems can be made very efficient by merely improving the efficiency of current practices, but the visibility and standards-inducing convergence of an object approach is expected to enable the kinds of benefits that come from law's best device - codification.

For a start on an object model, see this Draft_Legal_Object_Model.gdoc.