https://homepage.univie.ac.at/st.mueller/kafka_english.html
An article on the story: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html
So the gatekeeper is the system keeping us from Justice - mostly money, but also other less tangible barriers. In theory, everyone gets a lawyer, in practice some people can afford expensive ones.
Then the end twist got me confused.
Something about how we want to understand The Law, capital letters, but then there's only systems we make ourselves and understand ourselves would feel properly Kafka, I suppose. But you think that would be mapped to journeying towards some kind of Law?
I think it is very deliberately written to be impossible to "understand". If you think you have found its clear and unambiguous meaning, you're wrong.
> Permission is a Trap: The gatekeeper never uses physical force. The man fails because he accepts the psychological deterrence. He waits for external approval instead of acting.
> Systems are Designed to Stall: Bureaucracy exists to keep individuals waiting. Complying with arbitrary rules and being infinitely patient yields absolutely zero results.
> Your Path is Individual: The gate was made only for this specific man. By deferring to authority, he surrendered an opportunity tailored entirely to him.
> Action Over Compliance: The story is a warning against passive obedience. The system will gladly let you sit outside and rot if you never force the issue.
I don't understand #3, but the rest, especially #4 really ring true.
the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more profound, are what i mean by the law.
The reminder that there’s structure and content and they’re different is a good one. Even a small legal document has this microstructure of references, inside, outside explicitly and outside by inference.
I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."
I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?
(Even if it's only to argue that they aren't all that different in practice.)
IMHO the biggest mistake. It should be like that.
Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.
Also, not sure what makes it so impossible (debates on whether a given law is in effect seem pretty rare, though it does exist), but that may depend on where you come from and the applicable legal system.
* Laws of the Land
* Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Final 2
* Copy of Laws of the Land - Final
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29
* Laws of the Land - Definitive Version 2026-04-29 with 11 o' clock amendments
IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder
Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.
I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!
at that point why not just use something precise like a programming language? have there been efforts in that direction? genuine questions
A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.
The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!
A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to validate a document.
Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.
The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.
I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...