Sarah B. Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) presents Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Legislation, 75 S.M.U. L. Rev. 535 (2022), at Toronto as we speak as a part of its James Hausman Tax Legislation and Coverage Workshop Sequence hosted by Benjamin Alarie:

This Article describes a brand new programming language, Catala, created by a group of laptop scientists and attorneys. Catala gives a tractable and useful strategy to coding U.S. tax regulation that provides a extra clear formalization and will probably maintain the federal government extra accountable than the present patchwork of types, worksheets, and secret packages.

Whereas this Article describes a selected programming language, key traits of this specific language might generalize to different programming languages that formalize the regulation. First, Catala is a domain-specific programming language designed particularly for formalizing tax regulation. Particularly, Catala is structured utilizing default logic, a nonstandard logic that represents the underlying construction of the U.S. tax code extra precisely than does customary logic. This construction makes the pc code simpler to learn, simpler to create, and simpler to switch when the regulation adjustments. Second, laptop code is created in Catala utilizing a widely known strategy within the area of laptop science (although not often talked about in authorized literature) referred to as “pair programming,” which, on this implementation, takes benefit of the information of each attorneys and laptop coders. 

Lastly, Catala makes use of literate programming to create laptop code that’s, amongst different issues, simpler to learn and that communicates the choices behind the coding to the person.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/03/lawsky-presents-coding-the-code-catala-and-computationally-accessible-tax-law-today-at-toronto.html