"In 528 AD, Emperor Justinian inherited a Roman legal system drowning in centuries of accumulated laws, conflicting edicts, and contradictory jurisprudence. His solution was radical: commission the Corpus Juris Civilis, a comprehensive codification and streamlining of Roman law across all provinces. Over 14 months, Justinian's commission reduced approximately 3 million lines of legal text to just 150,000, laying the foundation for the Western legal canon."
"Between regulations, statutes, and case law, our country has accumulated around 260 million lines of law at the federal level alone. Agencies write rules to expand their authority and incumbents lobby for regulations that raise barriers to entry. While many politicians have tried with varied success to streamline modern law, the advent of AI changes the realm of possibility entirely."
"AI is capable of writing new laws and is already deployed by some states and federal agencies to identify opportunities for regulatory streamlining. In this new governance frontier, large language models are shaping American policy. Just recently, we learned that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - which thus far has focused on government spending - is now using AI to propose regulatory reductions."
In 528 AD, Emperor Justinian reduced roughly three million lines of legal text to 150,000 through the Corpus Juris Civilis, codifying and streamlining Roman law. Modern America contains roughly 260 million federal lines of law across regulations, statutes, and case law, with agencies expanding authority and incumbents lobbying for protective regulations. Artificial intelligence can write laws and identify regulatory streamlining opportunities, and agencies are beginning to deploy AI for that purpose. AI creates divergent futures: an AI-driven totalitarianism model and an AI-enabled republican renewal. Institutional sclerosis from accumulated laws historically invites authoritarian solutions.
Read at Fortune
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