Research

Government law execution is formalized in software, but that software is not published. This deepens the executive’s structural advantage in the separation of powers: it alone can see how operative law is applied, while Parliament, courts, and citizens cannot verify, review, or predict its application. This paper proposes that law execution be published as machine-executable specifications in a restricted, declarative format designed to be readable by legal professionals.

Governments increasingly use automated decision-making systems to apply legislation in domains such as social benefits, taxation, and licensing. While Rules as Code (RaC) approaches enable legally consistent and transparent decision-making through executable legislation, they do not automatically generate explanations that are understandable for citizens.

Where government executes the law from formalized rules, the formalization has to be tested against what the statute was meant to yield. But the expected outcomes a test needs almost always come from the formalizer, so the tests inherit the reading they were meant to check.

Ninety minutes with the demo in front of a room of researchers in law and computer science. We open Dutch statutes next to their executable specification, turn a threshold and watch who loses an allowance. Being argued with is the point.