Fairly frequently, countries try to
change their constitution. A committee drafts a constitution and the people
have two choices, to
ratify it or not.
Examples include:
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Italy presented to its voters a complicated constitution that was rejected.
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The European Union presented a
new constitution that would
increase the Union but it was rejected by the
voters in Denmark.
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The Iraqi's voted
on a Constitution in 2005.
But again, it was a take-it or leave-it proposition.
Thus, many Iraqi voters felt that they really did not like the one
offered, but voted on it because it
was better than not having any Constitution.
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And more recently, Turkey and Kenya had Constitutional
referenda.
And there have been proposals for unions, all that would require
a Constitution:
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a United States of East Africa as
reported very ably by the Economist.
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And a board game entrepreneur promoting a vision of a United States
of Africa.
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And lastly, uniting the entire world.
I proposed a Constitution Construction Kit, more later, which brings in
the idea of workflows, nesting workflows. Lastly, the ontology for legal
affairs, or computer
representations of legal knowledge, help a constitutional court or a Supreme Court deciding whether an act obeys the Constitution. And it helps us simulate.
WorkFlow
An insurance company claim system exemplifies a business work flow.
The insurance company decides that a claim under $1000.00 is handled
and decided
by a type
A employee. Those above that amount are preprocessed
by the type
B employee. But a committee of seven makes the final
decision and five out of the seven of these employees are needed to approve
the claim.
In either case, the claim is escallated to the president in three days
if a decision is not made.
The workflow diagram is shown below.
The workflow starts when someone submits a form. In the example, the policy
holder submits a claim. And one might have a workflow starting at a certain
time, ensuring that a person execute a backup and that someone verify the
backup was successful. Different individuals might fill out forms in
a certain order. That is the electrical engineer reviews the plan
and then the mechanical engineer reviews the form containing the plan. And in business, small
groups might approve or vote on an activity. For example, an investment
committee might have to approve a major capital project. Thus, the work
flow system would have to count the number of positive and negative
votes. And as we see above, based upon the results at each step, or
the contents of a form, the system wil determine which new state go into. Thus,
whether we go into State A or State B is determined by the amount of
the claim. Whether a commitee votes in one way or another determines what happens to the large claim. And time passing will cause us to go into
an "escalation" state.
Some workflows, based on a Petri net model allow parallel activities.
Thus, the Electrical Engineer and the mechanical Engineer can
review the document at the same time. When both give their approval, it goes
on to the next state
The workflow system will have things happen as we transition from state to
state. An email might go out, a credit card might be charged, or a letter
might be printed and sent via conventional postal mail. It is not difficult
to conceive of a workflow system activating a solenoid controlling
a valve in our chemical plant
at a certain state.
There are commercial workflow systems, where a
computer professional enters the equivalent of the dataflow in some language
or in XML, perhaps to be discussed in a future thoughtful Thursday.
Political Work Flows
The passing of a
bill shows how workflows can model something in a Constitution.
At the risk of being chauvanistic, I will use the United States Constitution,
specifically the passing of a money bill, which our Constitution specifies
must start with the House of Representatives.
We start with the House, which from the Constitution itself, simply emits
the bill with no explanation or specification of how (more about that later).
From there, as many readers will know the bill has to approved by the Senate
and then on to the President, who may sign, vetoe or do neither.
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Awaiting Senate Approval, after the House approves the bill
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Awaiting the President's Signature, after the Senate approves the Bill
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Depending upon what the president does, it may go to a termination state.
One of these is obviously Law Passed. If the President does nothing,
in ten days, and
Congress is in Session, the bill is considered passed. (I recall reading that Cypress
Semiconductor set up work flows where if someone who was supposed
to approve something simply failed to do something about, it went on as if
they did approval. This prevented someone from having to go chase a document
that was on a procrastinator's desk.)
However, should Congress ahve adjourned, then the bill is considered failed--
a pocket vetoe.
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The rest of the flow is an override steps, going back to the House of
Representatives, where the bill originated and then to the Senate
if 2/3 override.
Nested workflows
and Harel's State Charts
Simply, at any transition, there can be a whole workflow embedded.
The Constitution has a simple transition from the start of a bill to it
passing the house and awaiting the Senate to approve it.
But that is a whole workflow of a Representative bsumbmitting the bill and
being assigned to a Committee and being scheduled for debate and
being ammended and finally have a vote of the full house.
At any point in that time, the House could adjourn to be reelected in its
two year cycle, in which case the bill would fail.
At any point in the process of the Senate reviewing and voting
for a a Bill, the Congress could adjourn for a new session after new elections.
An additional feature is that one can model a flow from the superstate.
Thus, when the HOUSE or SENATE adjourns that kills any bills in process.
We can show that as a single arrow. The alternative would be draw an arrow
from every substate of the HOUSE or SENATE to the dead state for adjournment
as below.
One could also think of the boxes as a dataflow diagram--and I will have
to consider this later in the discussion of the Constitutional Construction
Kit, below.
State charts add to a simple state diagram, the ability to group states
into logical superstates. Sometimes these are called HIGRAPH's for
Hierarchical Graphs. State tables are often used in modelling
computer software embedded in device. In avionics software, "in all
airborne states, when yellow handle is pulled, seat will be ejected."
And these need to handle several things going on at the same times. In
a modern electronic wristwatch, the stopwatch might be in a state,
the date setting might be in another state, and the normal watch
itself is in a state. If one is in the process of setting
the stopwatch or using the stopwatch, one might hit the button to go
to the regular display state. When the owner then clicks a button to
go back to the stopwatch, we may want to leave them wherever they
were, perhaps in the process of setting the stop watch or
the stopwatch is clicking off times, rather than going back to a start state. Dr. Harel did a masterful writing in his article using his own Citizen's electronic wristwatch as the example.
These features are not as relevant in political state tables. However,
I can think of one example. In some states in some circumstances, one can appeal an order
in the lower court to the upper court, even if the lower court
has not finished with the case. Let's say one is getting ready to
try one's case. The Judge rules that your star witness cannot testify because
you made a spelling error in sending his name in. You could then
request the appeals court to review that decision and if whatever happened,
the case would go back to the lower court in same place as it was left off,
perhaps with allowing that person to testify.
The Constitutional Construction Kit (CCK)
Every couple of decades, the United States engages in Regime Change with
the nation somehow selecting a new Constitution. We saw it in
Philipines in the 1900's, Roosevelt writing a new Constitution for Haiti
new Constitutions for Germany and Japan after World War II,
and of course much later, a new Constitution for IRAQ.
Whether the United States will do this again is a subject ripe for speculation,
but not in this blog.
In simulating a Constitution, unlike working
with a business, one has to allow the particpatnts
or members of a body to create a new workflow.
In the United States Constitution, Article One,
Section Five, "Each House may determine the
Rule of its Proceedings."
We also have to allow various ways for
individuals to be come members of bodies.
That is we have to provide for elections
appointments and random selections.
The latter is only used today for juries.,
It is a very viable way of doing
participatory democracy, sortion.
Thus, if one were modelling the United States Constitution,
we would see a workflow from each of the House and Senate
to create or modify the workflow for creating and passing bills.
This concept is in other countrie's
constitutions. For example,
the
Iraqi Constitution has the Council of Representatives
cratings its bylaw for its rule. And article 93
designates that the
Council chooses how the courts will be run and how judges
and other officials are selected.
Bahama Constitution Article 55, provides that each House of its legislature
can regulates its procedure and make rules of procedures.
in the
Iranian Constitution, Article 62(2) specifies
that the law will set how their legislature is elected. And
like the United States, in Iraq and the Bahamas, the legislatures
determines their own procedure.
And if there is an election, we need
to provide for the rules of that election. And who resolves
disputes.
And in Secton Four,
both State Legislatures and
Congress can change the Workflow for the election of representatives.
A workflow has roles. For example, one specifies that an
Insurance Adjustor of Rank Two or Higher can prepare a claim of
over $1000.00 for Committee Decision. And we have a role called
Member of Claim Approval Process.
In a business workflow, one generally assumes this process is outside
the workflow diagram. That is, one does not have a workflow
to hire or promote a person to Insurance Adjustor Rank Two.
And we certainly don't have the computer
program handle those people authorized to change that procedure approving
the decision to change it. (The appropriate manager would simply
tell the computer professional to go change it ....)
But in a Constitution Construction Kit we need all these roles.
The people who elected to the House or Senate can change these workflows,
as can the State legislatures.
And our CCK must model these.
Approval Process
Our Constitution Construction Kit (CCK) will allow multiple parametric
Constitutions to be prepared, and a vote to be conducted.
Thus before the process starts, there has to be an optimized funcction.
This will be a natural generalization of the requirement for ratification.
For example, our constitution required nine out of thirteen states to vote.
The Iraqi Constitution required
n-2 out of the
n provinces
to approve by a majority vote.
There are two obvious extensions.
One can find the constitution that can get the majority vote in the most
states or provinces. Or one can find the constitution that maximizes
the vote in the province or state
that gave the nth lowest approval percentage. Thus, if constitution A
got votes in provinces:
33, 45 , 47, 49, 57, 58, 62
and constitution B got these votes:
22, 43, 49, 60, 62, 68, 70
If n were three,
Constitution B would win as its third lowest vote were 49.
But if n were only two, Constitution A would win.
(Thus, one can see the importance of specifying the ratification
procedure in advance.)
And if we had chosen in advance to look for the Constitution that had
the most provinces with a majority in favor, Constitution Two would win as
four states had a majority.
An ontology for constitutions
An ontology is a way of organizing knowledge, where there are links between
various concepts. Several groups, notably in the Netherlands, are developing
ontologies for legal concepts. One of these is the LKIF-Core
Ontology, funded by the European Union.
Organizations, Artifacts, and the Purposes they serve.
More specific to law, might be Statement, Declarations and
Assertions and Document, as a bearer of Statements.
The LKIF also has NORMATIVE statements such as
prohibitions.
They include obligations, allowance, obligations.
Thus, a penal code might be defined as a Document containing
prohibitions.
Our group will also include classifications, so we can say that
all persons who meet a condition are permitted to or required
to do.
Thus the United States First Amendment giving freedom of speech would
state that a particular ORGANIZATION (congress), could not contain
a PROHIBITION of a particular SPEECH ACT. (The capitalized things are
core concepts in the LKIF).
An ontology for constitutions would allow the parties to propose
and vote on the following:
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How are people chosen for officer positions or to be a member of
a named ORGANIZATION?
I identified three of these: election, appointment and sortition.
I deal with elections first; these are so much in the mind of the
average person about the purpose of the typical constitution.
Which ORGANIZATION if any can provide
further clarification?
Are there conditional rules if the above fail or have controversy?
The United States Constitution specifies these three
of these in its Article Two on choosing the President.
We see that the legislature sets the rules for appointing electors.
It provides that a majority vote is selecting. It also provides for
a default ROLE for the House of Representatives and Senate if there
is a controversy over the election of a member.
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The classifications of permissible
persons must be specified for both those doing the voting or electing.
Usually a constitution will state the CLASSIFICATION.
For example, the United States Constitution specifies the familiar (to
Americans) requirement that president
be thirty five years old and a natural-born citizen.
It also specifies requirements for the "Electors:" they are not
a Senator, Representative or a person holding"an office of trust or profit under the United States."
Or it may delegate it as in Article 47, Third section of the
Iraq
Constitution It states, "A law shall regulate the requirement
for the candidate [for Council of Representatives, the
voter and all that is connected with elections."
As mentioned earlier, representatives can be
specify that other organizations are chosen randomly from certain groups.
The only example of this in the United States Constitution is juries,
and even here the choosing process is not specified. However, many have
written about Sortition.
Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips proposed that the United
States House of Representatives be chosen randomly from the people.
Brian Martin proposes a network of decision making groups, which he terms
demarchy. He does not propose a specific "constitution"
for this network or a method of developing one, mentioning
"second order" bodies to "adjudicate on how demarchy is supposed to be work."
Paul Woodruff discusses how the Greeks implemented this idea. They had several mechanisms include a "Council of 500,"
"judges" and the election of experts for particular purposes.
Most constitutions also provide procedure for the appointment of specific
officers. (See Section Two, Clause Two of the United States Constitution
which provides for the appointment of officials such
as ambassadors, judges and others with "advice and consent" of two
thirds of the Senate.)
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prohibitions or grants of specific powers.
E. G. Congress can pass a law on any of the following subjects, as given
in Section Eight of Article One.
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Certain acts require certain percentages or other functions of one
or more groups.
An example from the United States Constitution are that
66% of the ORGANIZATION, Senate, must approve a treaty, a type of DOCUMENT.
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Obviously, one needs the mechanics for
A Constitutional PROHIBITION.
The Constitutional Court could be a workflow as a step on a law
before it is approved. Or it could be as part of a workflow for
resolving "CASES AND CONTROVERSIE's."
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I note that the Estrella project has put its ontology onto the
World Wide Web under the GNU Open Source license. Thus, I will be able
to build upon it.
References
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Boer, A. Winkels, R., Hoekstra, R and Van Engles, “Knowledge management for Legislative Drafting in an International Setting” In Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. Jurix 2003: The Sixteenth Annual Conference (Amsterdam) IOS Press 91-100
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Boer, A., Di Bello, M., van den Berg, K., Estrella, European Project for Standardised Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessability, Deliverable 1.1, Specificfication of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format, IST 2004 027655
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Harel, David, "StateCharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems"
Science of Computer Programming Volume Eight,
1987, 231 to 274.
See http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dharel/SCANNED.PAPERS/Statecharts.pdf
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Sanminiatelli, M.
\fIItalians Vote in Massive Reform Referendum\fR Yahoo News, Associated Press
can be found at
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2114939
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Yunker, James, A New Vision of Federal World Government, University Press of America, 2007
