Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RICHARD HEATON

I want you to imagine a place on the Internet where everything is true and this is a pretty important place, this is a place which contains all the principles and ideas and concepts that we think between us are important. Not big kind of philosophical ideas but the stuff that we think help society make, help society work and function properly, things that stop us squabbling incessantly.

So you’ll go to this place to find out who gets to be a citizen, who gets to be a citizen of our country. Whether you’re allowed to carry a gun. Who’s allowed to get married to who. And this stuff is true because we ourselves between us, we’ve given it authority.

Now I’m talking about the law, no surprise. The law, I could equally be talking about our operating system. The law, our operating system, is amazing, an amazing idea to write down and agree the rules of our society, an amazing achievement. It’s also the story of our nation, the story of any country. A country’s history is told through the evolution of its operating system. So I brought you an example.

Go back to the early 19th century. Britain’s just finished a long ruinous war against Napoleon. Britain and the whole of Europe are plunged into a deep recession and the streets of London and our major cities are filled with thousands and thousands of discharged soldiers and sailors with no job, no work, no money, no food and the government and Parliament responds with a number of punitive statutes. This is one of them. This is the 1824 Vagrancy Act which punishes idle and disorderly persons and rogues and vagabonds with hard labour.

This is the 1824 Vagrancy Act still parts much amended but still in force. So look law is important and it’s really interesting. Those are the two qualities that got me into the law and got me into government law in particular. Law is important and it’s interesting, but there’s one aspect of law that’s a bit different. That’s what happens when you actually try and use it, when you actually try and look up the law.

You maybe want to check the law. You want to see if you’re complying. You want the law to guide your life and then it’s actually a bit of a misery because the user finds law complicated and difficult, difficult to navigate, confusing, hard to understand. And that’s always troubled me as a lawyer and it really should trouble all of us for whom this stuff is important.

So how did we let the law get into this state? What virus has infected our beautiful operating system? Well look, a number of reasons. I suppose you might start with volume. There are maybe 50 million words of law, of statute law, like this in force right now, 50 million. That’s a guess. We don’t know.

50 million words and every month the hundred thousand words are added or subtracted or taken away or amended,. That makes a hundred thousand new words of law every month. That’s roughly speaking the complete works of Shakespeare twice a year. That’s a lot of law.

What happens when you try and find something in this great mountain of words? Maybe you’re looking for the law on fingerprints. You find a statute and it’s called the Fingerprints Act of 1986. I made that up, it doesn’t exist, but you found the statute and you think, OK, I’ve got it.

But then you discover that maybe the statute’s been amended 30 times in 30 years so you’re looking for an amended version and then you discover that lots of the amendments aren’t yet in force so you’re kind of looking for a real-time version with the prospective amendments circling overhead. And then you discover there’s an Act over here which is supposed to help you by telling you that wherever you see finger on the statute it includes the word thumb.

And then you discover that actually fingerprints law is just contained in 20 different statutes, not one, and they’re all called different things and then you’ve got your head around that and you discover something called a fingerprint regulations. And you kind of give up and you go home.

Law can be really, really difficult. In fact, if there was a wall map of the statute book, and I would love someone to produce a wall map of the statute book, some bits are so confusing that the cartographer would kind of give up and write ‘here be sea monsters.’ This can be really, really difficult stuff.

And to add to that, the only tool that we use when we’re writing this stuff, the only tool we’ve got at our disposal is words and sentences and numbered paragraphs, same techniques we’ve been using for a thousand years, and we’re asked to achieve enormous detail in law. And to achieve detail, you have to add more and more words, and you do that at the expense of readability. So you have a paradox of precise language where you achieve certainty at the expense of clarity.

And you know there’s something about the language as well of law. It’s a kind of, it’s kind of deadening quality. It’s not quite jargon, but it’s the words we use. We have to choose precise words, you see, and we’re not allowed to use words that are colourful or or rhetorical, they have to be precise words. So the sorts of words that would engage you if you’re reading a book aren’t the words that we tend to use in the statute.

So if I could see you I would ask what are your favourite words? And I might get joyful, or quizzical, or purple or tulip. Those are not the language of law. Tulip does turn up once in the statute, but that is not the language of law. We don’t use words like that and I don’t suppose you’ll be coming up with words like necessary, or satisfactory, or schedule, or commence.

So anyway, all sorts of reasons, which make it a bit a challenge for us working on this side of the fence making laws, drafting laws, parliamentarians but also people lobbying for changes of the law. We are collaborators in an operating system, which by virtue of its complexity and its form and its architecture, are a million miles away from what is usable for the citizen. So that’s a challenge.

Now at this stage do I despair? I don’t actually. I’m really, really optimistic. I’m really optimistic that the law and your experience of the law could get and will get is about to get much, much better. And we’re kind of calling this good law.

First rule of good law: don’t make it worse. OK, you’ve got 50 million words of statute. Let’s see if we can try not to add to it unless we really have to. Let’s see if we can legislate maybe less or in less detail. What happens if we use fewer rules?

What happens if we leave more to trust or to common sense or to behaviour or to incentives? And while we’re about it, should we all agree not to make bad law? I’ll leave that thought with you.

Second rule of good law, first was don’t make it worst. Second rule of good law: make it better. Look, law is a complicated system. Yeah, OK? There are hundreds of complicated systems. We are no longer terrified by complexity.

We have the tools. We have the computing power. We have the ability to deal with complexity and to bring it to order. The same is true for law. How do we go about that?

Well first of all we think of law not just as language but as data. 50 million words of law, that’s not just a pile of words, there are patterns in there and we can treat this stuff as data. We can manage it. We can present it. We can manipulate it. We can make it available to an individual, to you, in a way that suits you just as we’re doing in healthcare data or weather data. Law is data.

We need to borrow. We need to borrow from information science. We need to borrow from software engineering. We need to use techniques like design patterns, easy to use, out-of-the-box frameworks, hypertext. That is not the language they use at the Palace of Westminster but it needs to become part of the language of lawmaking.

I think we probably also need to look at the form in which we pass laws and the architecture as well. Maybe it’s actually time to move away from this series of sequential time stamped documents, convenient to parliament and interesting to historians, but actually utterly baffling to users. Because we need, don’t we, to put law at the service of people rather than letting it be something that gets in the way, confuses, obfuscates, causes friction, causes disputes. That’s the key to it. We need to achieve clarity.

There’s a thought that’s lingering in my mind here about whether there are some areas of the law or some areas of existence, of life which are simply too complicated to be regulated by this technique of words and sentences and numbered paragraphs. Because it’s really striking to me that law is about the only modern discipline that actually only uses language. We don’t use symbols much. We don’t use pictures. We don’t use sounds. And that kind of, um, that places quite a big restriction on it.

So if I was to ask you to describe in great detail and accuracy and precision the Milky Way using only words and numbered paragraphs that would be quite difficult. Or supposing I was drafting a bit of road traffic law so it’s aimed to be read and understood by you, the driver. That bit make sense. But supposing the driver in 10 years time is a robot. What happens then?

Are my word supposed to be turned into computer code? Does the code become the law? Again I’ll leave that thought with you.

My real reason, however, my real reason for optimism that this will get better is that for the first time in history our operating system is in your hands. Two million of you, two million people in the United Kingdom every month are accessing legislation.gov.uk, brilliant website. Two million people are accessing it, which means that never again will law be imprisoned in law libraries and advocates chambers and the Palace of Westminster.

It’s out there. You are using it. You will demand improvements and better access to the law. You will innovate. You’ll put pressure on us and on business to innovate for you so that the law you use and have access to makes sense for you. And that for me would be fantastic news because look, this stuff, our law, our operating system, is something we should feel comfortable by and not alienated by.

Law belongs to us. This is our operating system. This is your law. So ladies and gentlemen, I would invite you to take part in good law and above all, reclaim the law. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]