ambiguity index

what law can actually be code.

SPRIND says Germany will publish statutes as executable code. CATALA · Inria · DGFiP took five years to encode one section of French tax code. The Ambiguity Index is the map — clause by clause — of which law can be deterministic logic and which is irreducibly human judgment.

3-bucket rubric 5 jurisdictions (v1) audited by /law-as-code-audit AGPL-3.0

Jurisdictions ranked by mean Codifiability Score across audited statutes. Higher = more of the law is encodable as deterministic logic.

v0 seed — 3 statutes, 2 jurisdictions. v1 target: 5 × 20 = 100.

methodology, in one screen

bucket
deterministic
score 1.0

Pure logic. Inputs defined. Outputs unambiguous. No reasonable lawyer disagrees.

e.g. "incapable under age 7"

bucket
semi-deterministic
score 0.5

Encodable if you supply default rules for the contested terms or thresholds.

e.g. "within a reasonable time"

bucket
judgment-bound
score 0.0

Irreducibly human. Encoding it would impose one judge's view, not the law.

e.g. "good faith", "equity"

Codifiability Score = mean(clause scores) × 100. Bias toward judgment-bound when unsure. A low score is not a measure of bad law — judgment-bound clauses exist for good reasons. Full doc: methodology/scoring.md.