Hard-coded law enforcement is possible but it needs some latitude too

livemint.com:

I have long been a proponent of ‘techno-legal’ governance—a hybrid system of laws and code where laws and regulations are embedded directly into the technology system. It has become increasingly possible for us to encode legal requirements directly into the ecosystems upon which we depend. Given that neither the laissez-faire approach to governance that the US pioneered nor the regulation-heavy approach taken by Europe has proven successful at regulating digital spaces, I am hopeful that this hybrid approach will offer us new ways in which we can extract the benefits of technology while safeguarding ourselves against its harms.

As I thought more about this approach, it struck me that technology systems are inherently precise. Which means that laws hard-coded into them will be strictly enforced. When laws are embedded in the code, there is no way that a transaction will be allowed to proceed if it is not legally permitted—even if every single participant indicates a willingness to go ahead with it.

Why, one might ask, is this a problem? After all, laws are written to be obeyed and any system designed to ensure that they cannot be violated can only be good for society. This, as we well know, is not how society functions today. Even though laws are carefully drafted to describe the boundaries of what is permissible, given the imprecision inherent in some of the words used to frame them, we have come to expect latitude in enforcement.