Changing technologies render tax law’s intricacy legible in new ways. Advances in large language models, natural language processing, and programming languages designed for the domain of tax law make formalizations, or “representation[s] of [ ] legislation in symbols[ ] using logical connectives,” of tax law that capture much of its substance and structure both possible and realistic. These new formalizations can be used for many different purposes—what one might call flexible formalizations. Flexible formalizations will make law subject to computational analysis, including creating automated explanations of the analysis and testing statutes for consistency and unintended outcomes. This Essay builds upon existing work in computational law and digitalizing legislation.
Technology
The Facebook Oversight Board (the “FOB”) will see you now—well, at least a very small number of a select subset of you.
The author would like to thank participants in workshops at Stanford Law School and Florida Law School for their feedback on the content of this article, and Victoria Ianni for her research assistance. This paper is a version of a talk given at The University of Chicago Law School’s Surveillance Symposium, June 15–16, 2007.
My work on this paper began while I was a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and it benefited there from the support of the Milton and Miriam Handler Foundation. It also received support from the Dean’s Research Fund at Brooklyn Law School as well as a summer research grant from Boalt Hall. Patricia Bellia, Jon Michaels, Chris Slobogin, Stephen Sugarman, and Frank Zimring offered helpful suggestions.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone. All three authors received their JD degrees from Yale Law School in 1985.
Both authors have consulted for Visa Inc. But our views on this subject are our own. We thank Chad Clamage, Stanford Law School, Class of 2008, and Ramtin Taheri, The University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2009, for their valuable research assistance on earlier drafts of the article.
Thanks to Susan Cohen, Oscar Gandy, Ian Kerr, David Phillips, Neil Richards, Rebecca Tushnet, participants in the Unblinking Workshop at UC Berkeley, and participants in The University of Chicago Law School’s Surveillance Symposium for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, to Kirstie Ball for sharing her work in progress on exposure as an organizing concept for surveillance, and to Amanda Kane and Christopher Klimmek for research assistance.
I thank A.J. Bellia, Susan Freiwald, Nicole Garnett, John Nagle, Ira Rubenstein, and Paul Schwartz for helpful comments and discussions, and research librarian Christopher O’Byrne for expert research assistance.
Much appreciation to Colin Bennett, Malcolm Crompton, Peter Cullen, Lauren Edelman, Robert Gellman, Chris Hoofnagle, Robert Kagan, Jennifer King, Anne Joseph O’Connell, Fred B. Schneider, Ari Schwartz, Paul Schwartz, and the participants at The University of Chicago Law School’s Surveillance Symposium for insight, comment, and discussion; Nuala O’Connor Kelly and Peter Swire for consenting to be interviewed about their experience in privacy leadership roles within the United States government; Sara Terheggen, Marta Porwit Czajkowska, Rebecca Henshaw, and Andrew McDiarmid for their able research.
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