Examples
This document illustrates regulative rules by example.
How do Regulative Rules Differ from Constitutive Rules?
Constitutive rules talk about what things must be -- usually to qualify, or be valid, in some way. For example, "for the purposes of a certain contract, a day of the week counts as a weekend day if is a Saturday or a Sunday." Sometimes also phrased "must have".
Regulative rules talk about what people must do, mustn't do, or may do -- and what happens to them if they do, and if they don't. Sometimes there are deadlines associated. The subject of a regulative rule is always a person, an entity, some sort of actor in the system.
If the subject of a rule is some inanimate object, we attempt to rephrase it so it is obviously either constitutive or regulative.
This is a constitutive rule, even if it is phrased in the active voice: "court filings must show the case number on the first page" is a constitutive rule. If the court filing doesn't show the case number on the front page, it is a defective, invalid, non-qualifying court filing.
This is a regulative rule: "court filings must be made no later than two weeks before the next hearing date." Some person -- some lawyer -- is on the hook for making that filing, and the consequence for not making that filing might be summary dismissal.
"Drivers must show a driver's license on demand by a police officer" is a regulative rule, because the subject is a person.
As a special case, some rules talk about what persons must have done, to qualify for some future action. These hybrid rules blend both constitutive and regulative aspects, because a person who followed a certain path described by regulative rules, may now qualify in a certain way as having a special status, which is a constitutive.
Borrowing a book from the library
[TODO] Picking up kids from school
A Fine is a Price.
Flood & Goodenough loan agreement
Fighting International Crime
MACMA says:
Where the appropriate authority of a foreign country makes a request that evidence be taken in Singapore for the purposes of any criminal proceedings pending in a court in the foreign country, the Attorney-General may, by written notice, authorise a Magistrate to take the evidence.
Imagine a busy and tired Attorney-General, faced with a fax that just randomly showed up ("I didn't know we even have a fax machine!"), skeptically examining the request, looking for any reason at all to turn it down:
does this come from a foreign country?
is the sender some appropriate authority of that country?
are they requesting that evidence be taken in Singapore?
is the evidence for the purposes of a criminal proceeding
that is pending in a court
in that foreign country?
If any of those questions comes short of a "yes", then the AG would say "fax them back and tell them to go look at the MACMA requirements."
Reasons To Say No
Maybe it's a civil proceeding. Maybe the fax didn't show any proof that the criminal proceeding is pending in a court -- maybe it's still being investigated by the police. Maybe the authority who sent the fax is a president whose impeachment is very likely to conclude successfully within the week. Any one of these facts could give the AG grounds to reject the request.
Suppose the volume of faxes grows from a trickle to a flood. The AG doesn't want to have to think through all these questions each time. She could delegate the screening to a staff member. Or to a computer. Either way the AG has to export the above questions from her head into a checklist that an eager but not very experienced staff member can understand.
How might the AG teach their team to handle these faxes?
Constitutive Elements: Black And White Decision Logic
The "where" part of the sentence is phrased as a constitutive rule that determines if a request is valid, or qualifying.
The AG might rearrange the sentence on a whiteboard:
The AG might draw a checkbox at the left of each line above, and say to her staff, "every fax that comes in, file it into the Go pile if all the boxes get checked; file it into the Review pile if any of the boxes isn't checked."
That deals with the decision logic of the request.
Regulative Elements: The Moving Parts
Next we deal with the regulative aspect of the sentence: the behaviours of actors, the moving parts, events happening in time.
If the request is valid, the AG moves on to the next step:
write a letter
to some magistrate
instructing them to take the evidence specified in the request
At the top level, there are two connected events: the foreign authority makes a (valid) request; then the local Attorney-General authorises a Magistrate.
How does L4 connect those two events? With HENCE.
GIVEN fc IS A Country
ag IS A Person -- the attorney general
PARTY auth IS A Person
WHO `is an appropriate authority`
MAY `make a request` -- details to be fleshed out later
HENCE PARTY ag
MAY `authorise a Magistrate` -- details laterAbout HENCE
HENCEHENCE connects two regulative stanzas.
If the first stanza is fulfilled -- if the preconditions are met and
the party does the action properly by the deadline -- then the plot of
the story proceeds to the stanza under HENCE.
Indeed, you can think of HENCE as a special kind of THEN.
You can trace the "happy path" of a contract by following the HENCE
connections: everybody does what they should, and before you know it,
the game is over and everyone is happy.
For every THEN, there's an ELSE. What's ELSE in L4?
LEST.
About LEST
LESTLEST also connects two regulative stanzas.
If the first stanza is not fulfilled -- if the preconditions are met,
but the party does not perform the action properly by the deadline
-- then the plot of the story turns to the LEST branch. Penalties
and redemption.
This is the structure of many stories: some original sin occurs, and
the story concerns itself not with what should have happened ideally,
but how the hero strives to repair the damage and restore the world to
its original Edenic state. This gives us the Odyssey, not to mention
the Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame couplet, *and *Spider-Man:
Into the Multiverse*. It also gives the except branch of everytry/except exception handler. And it gives us that part of contracts
which deal with reparations.
Most MAY stanzas don't have an explicit LEST, because if an actor
chooses not to do something that was optional in the first place,
that's fine. Technically speaking, an implicit default LEST Fulfilled is automatically inserted to fill the gap.
Many MAY stanzas follow the pattern "Party A MAY do X, hence Party B
MUST do Y" -- because an optional action is only interesting if it
eventually creates a new obligation. This MACMA example breaks that
pattern, but that's sovereignty for you.
Theory note: This is a good illustration of the special nature of official communication. Searle identified speech acts as utterances that constitute institutional events. Many labeled transition systems formalize these speech acts as messages passed between actors: requests, notices, authorisations, demands, apologies, and so on are types of such communications.
Constitutives Within Regulatives
The two top-level actions -- by the foreign appropriate authority, and by the Attorney-General -- are themselves qualified with constitutive elements. For the incoming request to be valid, it must meet certain criteria, as seen above. And the action taken by the AG is narrowly specified: to authorise a Magistrate, in writing, to take the evidence.
So that twines us back to the decision logic of validity and qualification. In other words, within Searle's regulative rules, we find embedded constitutive rules.
Let's flesh out those details.
GIVEN fc IS A Country
ag IS A Person -- the attorney general
PARTY aa IS A Person
WHO `is an appropriate authority`
MAY `make a request`
that: `evidence be taken in Singapore`
for: `the purposes of`
.. `any criminal proceedings`
.. `pending in`
.. `a court in` fc
HENCE PARTY ag
MAY `authorise a Magistrate`
by: `written notice`
to: `take the evidence`Syntax For Parameterizing and Conjoining Components
We've introduced a couple of new syntactic constructs here: theparametric colon : gives detail to actions; and theasyndetic conjunction .. breaks up a long sentence into
shorter chunks, each of which is a Boolean.
Those chunks matter: they form the constitutive conditions for a thing to qualify.
Expanding and Substituting "An Appropriate Authority"
Some of these questions may expand further. From MACMA:
“appropriate authority”, in relation to a foreign country, means a person or authority whom the Attorney‑General is satisfied is authorised under the law of that country — (a) in the case of a request by that country to Singapore for assistance in a criminal matter, to make the request; or (b) in the case of a request by Singapore to that country for assistance in a criminal matter, to receive the request;
That turns into the following L4:
DECLARE Direction IS ONE OF Inbound, Outbound
GIVEN fc IS A Country
ag IS A Person -- the attorney general
aa IS A Person -- someone claiming to be an appropriate authority
dir IS A Direction
`to make request` IS A BOOLEAN
`to receive request` IS A BOOLEAN
DECIDE `is an appropriate authority` IF
`is a person` aa
OR `is an authority` aa
AND `is satisfied is authorised under the law of` ag aa fc
.. CONSIDER dir
WHEN Inbound THEN `to make request`
WHEN Outbound THEN `to receive request`Discretion to Proceed
Note that the AG isn't forced to do proceed to instruct the
Magistrate: the law says that they may. It doesn't say that theymust. Maybe the request comes from some pariah state which the
international community proscribes? Then the AG could ignore the fax
without consequence: that's why the LEST of a MAY is Fulfilled.
Putting it all together in L4
The L4 could be even more specific about the evidence and the magistrate, and general about the countries involved:
GIVEN fc IS A Country
sg IS A Country
ag IS A Person -- the attorney general
mm IS A Person -- the magistrate
e IS AN Evidence
IF sg EQUALS Singapore
PARTY aa IS A Person
WHO `is an appropriate authority`
MAY `make a request` -- this will become a action datatype
that: `evidence` e
be: `taken in` sg
for: `the purposes of`
.. `any criminal proceedings`
.. `pending in a court`
.. `in` fc
HENCE PARTY ag
WHO `is the attorney general of` sg
MAY `authorise` mm
by: `written notice`
to: `take the evidence` e
IF `is a magistrate of` mm sgThis structure now lays bare the necessary parameters to the moving parts: we have room to explicitly identify
the foreign country
the responding country (which is quickly required to be solely Singapore)
the attorney general
some magistrate in Singapore
the evidence
And the end-user filling in this form will have to click through the following fields to confirm their truth value:
You could imagine the AG checklisting this in her head.
Desugaring the parametric colon
The colon : was chosen to match current usage in Javascript, Python, JSON, and YAML: key/value syntax.
How would an L4 implementation desugar and interpret this syntax?
We know from CSL that the idea is to have an action with action_parameters.
IF sg EQUALS Singapore
PARTY aa IS A Person
WHO `is an appropriate authority`
MAY `make a request` -- this will become a action datatype
that: `evidence` e
be: `taken in` sg
for: `the purposes of`
.. `any criminal proceedings`
.. `pending in a court`
.. `in` fcWe can use named record fields for a lot of this:
DECLARE requestParams
HAS that IS A BOOLEAN
be IS A BOOLEAN
for IS A Record
HAS `the purposes of` IS A BOOLEAN
`any criminal proceedings` IS A BOOLEAN
`pending in a court` IS A BOOLEAN
`in` IS A FUNCTION FROM Country TO BOOLEAN
DECLARE Actions
IS ONE OF
`make a request` HAS params IS A requestParams
`authorise` HAS params IS A authoriseParams
... MAY `make a request`
that IS `evidence e`
be IS `taken in` sg
for IS `the purposes of`
`any criminal proceedings`
`pending in a court`
`in` fcContinue: Regulative Deontics
Appendix A: Ambiguity in Appropriate Authority
The process of formalization reveals a possible lexical ambiguity in the original statute. We bring this up mainly for the sake of the tutorial.
There is another, somewhat contrived, but still possible reading of the same text:
DECIDE `is an appropriate authority of` IF
`is a person`
OR `is an authority` aa
AND `is satisfied is authorised under the law of` ag aa fc
.. CONSIDER dir
WHEN Inbound THEN `to make request`
WHEN Outbound THEN `to receive request`In other words, authorities need to be authorised, but persons are enough.
Illustration. Let's look at what happens if the request originates from:
the International Crimes Authority of Sokovia
Lex Luthor, Special Master appointed by some judge in a criminal case
Jonah Jameson, attorney for the defense
In the first case, the fax contains, in Annex A, an excerpt from some law of the foreign country establishing the International Crimes Authority jointly under the Sokovian Ministry of Law and the Sokovian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and empowering it to make requests of foreign governments. So the AG is satisfied that the department is an appropriate authority, authorised under the law of the foreign country to make such requests.
In the second case, some research reveals that the criminal case in the foreign country has multiple international elements; the fax includes, in Annex A, a court order from the relevant judge appointing Lex Luthor as a special representative of the court instructed to liaise with foreign governments to gather relevant evidence. So the AG is satisfied that Lex is a person authorised under the law of the foreign country to make the request.
Any Person!?
In the third case, the AG can't find any law in the foreign country that authorizes attorneys for the defense to request evidence from international sources. So Lex Luthor is just a person, and he is looking like an unauthorised person at that. The AG gets ready to write back, saying, sorry, you don't seem to be an appropriate authority. But Lex Luthor, having anticipated this, has attached, in Annex A, text from our statute:
“appropriate authority”, in relation to a foreign country, means
a person
or authority whom the Attorney‑General is satisfied is authorised under the law of that country —
(a) in the case of a request by that country to Singapore for assistance in a criminal matter, to make the request; or
(b) in the case of a request by Singapore to that country for assistance in a criminal matter, to receive the request;
Lex has made a small circle, in pen, around "a person"; and a large circle around "or authority ..." through to the end of the paragraph.
There's a handwritten note that says "a plain reading shows that an appropriate authority can be either a person or an authority" -- creating some doubt about just why a "person" was shoehorned into the definition, which otherwise uses "authority" lingo.
In this admittedly preposterous reading, an authority such as a department under the Ministry of Law would need to be explicitly authorised under the law of the foreign country ... but an individual person doesn't need to be so authorized; indeed, any natural person could be the source of a request.
Preposterous as this may be, the Attorney-General's staffer handling this case does not speak English as a first language; if they did, they would formulate an argument that if Lex's interpretation were what Parliament had intended, the text of the definition would have said "any person; or an authority which..." ... but this distinction is too subtle, and eludes them.
Instead what happens is the staffer just goes along with Lex's interpretation, bamboozled by his impressiveness.
And Lex Luthor wins the right to collect their evidence.
It might be obvious to the average native speaker of English that this can't possibly be what Parliament intended; but Lex got to be the richest man on the planet precisely by outsmarting the average native speaker of English!
If this law had been drafted in L4 in the first place, it would have been clear which interpretation was intended. L4 eliminates these ambiguities.
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