[HN Gopher] Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives diffi...
___________________________________________________________________
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with
legal language
Author : rntn
Score : 262 points
Date : 2022-09-18 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| as part of graduate school, I participated in State of California
| hearings, studied particular regulations that were adopted after
| a major law was passed in my chosen field, and finally submitted
| (and had accepted) amendments to their final regulations. (this
| is not trivial, since there were more than 400 public comments
| and suggested changes to the administrative rulings, but less
| than three dozen were accepted - including mine).
|
| What I learned: the written law is ambiguous, mostly
| intentionally. The reply at the time was that the legislators
| "set the direction" and it is up to political appointees at an
| agency, working with their staff, to write regulation based on
| the "intent of the Legislature."
|
| The published regulations that implemented the law were written
| in such a way, that the references were actually circular, and
| the same term (noun) was used in two different places to mean two
| different things, without acknowledging that. I did as others
| suggested, and drew diagrams with notes to check the very very
| dense legalese in the regulations. My change was regarding that
| twice-defined noun, which they acknowledged by accepting the
| change.
|
| Overall - what is said is not what is done -- the saying I heard
| in Sacramento was "never write what you can say, never say what
| you can imply, and never imply if you can nod or wink" What that
| means is cynical; that you habitually do not write what you
| really mean to do, knowing that it will be reviewed by your
| adversaries, and taken out of context to be used against you.
|
| The regulations writing was adversarial, and the response from
| the agency involved was measured and ready for court, at every
| step. The default action in the public comment period is to
| ignore your comment, and they do that in most cases.
| abhinai wrote:
| Same with academic papers. Most of my efforts go into dealing
| with constant loss of attention that happens when I have to look
| up unnecessarily complex words or improperly defined symbols and
| variable names. I feel stupid until I realize that the paper is
| actually about a very simple concept. It doesn't have to be this
| hard to read.
| zaphod420 wrote:
| Why can't they just use normal English language for contracts?
| How did it get to be this way?
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| It's about resolution, I think. What one needs functionally is
| a list of negations e.g. "thou shalt not"/"this does not" and
| affirmations "thou shalt"/"this does" most generally, the
| tightest feasible 95% CI - essentially bulletpoints.
|
| In looking at the human interaction space and regulating it,
| they're sort of trying to verbally describe the output of the
| Mandelbrot set while maintaining a coherent enough structure
| that it can be understood at a linguistic level by others. The
| closer they get to the ground truth the more complex things get
| in the explanations. And everybody doing this has gone down a
| specialized rabbithole, they have familiarity with a lineage of
| particular language that describes, fairly concisely, a known-
| good model for some contour in the set.
|
| At least that's what I get from it in the scientific domain.
| Like if I rambled this shit off to the general public - and
| maybe here - they wouldn't know what I was saying. What's a
| confidence interval, what's a Mandelbrot set, what implications
| does it have in the context, what do I mean by model..?
|
| Moreover the systems being scrutinized _are_ based on
| precedence. Science works its way up to law, and court
| precedence sets the bar for future interpretations, including
| the structure of contracts - but also informally by
| understanding the grey areas in application, like what you can
| propose to people ignorant of the law that wouldn 't be upheld
| by courts. So the specialist lineages are allowed to
| proliferate and remodel, I think it's something that simply
| comes as a product of persistent structures in... Any human
| endeavor. I'm no coder, but I've heard many times of horrifying
| outmoded codebases continuing forward, it's an artifact of
| systemic inertia and optimization around a nucleus of enduring
| legacy.
| johndhi wrote:
| Accurate for law, too.
|
| In a contract: -commercial lawyer drafts indemnity paragraph
| (based on weird world of commercial law) -ip lawyer drafts ip
| paragraph (based on weird world of ip law) -litigator drafts
| termination clause
|
| Etc etc
| Tomte wrote:
| For the same reason why programmers can't just use normal
| English when talking about software.
| pessimizer wrote:
| So because the computer doesn't understand English, or
| because the terminology is often new and constantly changing?
| choudharism wrote:
| In a way, both - along with a third reason. English (like
| any natural language) is ambiguous and often depends on
| context. The attempt to "reinforce" ideas in English so
| that there is no way to have different interpretations is
| what lands you with legalese. Imagine having to program
| with that.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Because normal human language doesn't describe things
| exactly and exhaustively specifying the edge cases; as soon
| as you need do that (and you do, in law, programming, math
| proofs, etc), even if you don't use a single specific term
| you get language that looks like legalese.
|
| In essence, none of the commonly used English words means
| _exactly_ what you need to, so you need to add many
| explicit qualifiers to specify which parts of that wide and
| vague meaning shall apply and which shall not.
| [deleted]
| Sebguer wrote:
| Normal English evolves. Contracts rely on precise, shared
| understanding, and so it builds up its own jargon and
| shibboleths to represent concepts that everyone can have a
| singular understanding of. You don't want there to be any
| ambiguity in your contract, or any chance that courtroom
| precedents may not apply because your language differed from
| the 'norm'.
| tomrod wrote:
| By your explanation, the language is broken by design. It
| cannot simultaneously not change while also develop
| shibboleths.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The parent commenter said explicitly that Legal English1
| "builds up its own jargon and shibboleths". However, this
| type of change happens differently than how general English
| evolves. It might help to think of Legal English as a DSL.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English
| tomrod wrote:
| That's actually a great way to classify it and makes
| sense.
| [deleted]
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Or more
| generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
|
| English is so incredibly context sensitive at every level from
| word construction to paragraphs that words/sentences/paragraphs
| are meaningless on their own.
|
| You'd need a meta language to describe what the contracts mean.
| Which is what legal language is trying to be. If software
| engineers were building it today they'd probably add type
| judgments to each word/sentence/paragraph to enforce the right
| interpretation, e.g. (: ((: (time flies)
| noun) (: like proposition) (: (an
| arrow) noun)) sentence)
|
| I don't think most people would find that a large improvement
| in legibility.
| johndhi wrote:
| I am a lawyer who works with but doesn't do a MASSIVE amount of
| contract writing like some.
|
| I don't think "poor writing" is the right phrasing here, which
| implies ignorance or ineptitude.
|
| I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is
| because laypeople aren't the intended audience. We all know no
| one reads these, so we write them to future lawyers and courts
| who might want to get our clients in trouble. We try to create
| loopholes for our future selves.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _I think the reason contracts aren 't readable to laypeople
| is because laypeople aren't the intended audience._
|
| That's _partly_ true -- but there 's no reason a contract can't
| be written to be understandable by mere mortals. (I do a lot of
| contract drafting and have been teaching it to 3Ls for years.)
| johndhi wrote:
| Cool!
|
| Let me ask you this, though: why shouldn't I be a L.O.A.D.?
|
| Also, who's the L.O.A.D. when I and a counterparty are
| editing a contract someone else drafted a template for five
| years ago? Am I expected to use my negotiating 'gun powder'
| to fix clarity issues?
|
| Ultimately, the ethical responsibility is to choose the best
| client representation over the most readable contract, right?
| Those don't always overlap, do they?
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Ultimately, the ethical responsibility is to choose the
| best client representation over the most readable contract,
| right? Those don 't always overlap, do they?_
|
| It depends on what's meant by "the best client
| representation" -- is it "best" for the lawyer, or for the
| client?
|
| What _clients_ want -- pretty much universally -- is a
| contract that:
|
| * sensibly _and understandably_ handles the usual use
| cases;
|
| * addresses the important business risks; and
|
| * _can be negotiated and signed quickly_ -- in many cases
| that might be the client 's most-important consideration,
| because the client is confident that the deal will go
| smoothly and/or that the business risks are low -- and an
| understandable contract draft can be negotiated far more
| quickly than a draft that's loaded with "wall of words"
| provisions.
|
| (The old saying is that most contracts are signed and never
| seen again, either because the deal goes smoothly or the
| business people work out any difficulties between
| themselves without getting lawyers involved.)
|
| _Almost never_ do clients give a [hoot] about maximizing
| their theoretical legal position for every conceivable set
| of circumstances -- in fact, they 're actively hostile to
| doing so if it means undue delay in getting the deal to
| signature.
|
| A relevant Dilbert cartoon:
| https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-08-28
|
| (Source: 40 years of law practice, including nearly seven
| years as vice president and general counsel of a public
| software company that I'd helped the founders to start.)
| swayvil wrote:
| I imagine that a contract must be written for the malevolent
| reader. The opposite of generous. Striving not to communicate,
| but to preemptively win every possible argument. An airtight
| construction.
|
| Quite different from a conversation. Well, an ideal
| conversation anyway. Internet conversations seem to be more
| combative every day.
| johndhi wrote:
| What you're describing is more applicable to a motion filed
| in court (one party is in battle with the other and has no
| reason to be friendly to the other party at all).
|
| In the case of contracts, you're partially right, but it's
| more nuanced. The weird thing about contracts is that at the
| time they are signed, two parties need to agree with each
| other. If you're hiring a software vendor and I am your
| lawyer, I need to try to achieve two things at once: protect
| the company legally, but also sign the deal so that you can
| use the vendor. So I'm inclined to be somewhat friendly with
| the other side and to forego "air tight" legal defense of my
| side so that we can reach agreement.
|
| Unfortunately this process has a side externality for
| clarity: we negotiate little parts of a template and the way
| we do so probably doesn't jive all that well with the
| template language.
| johndhi wrote:
| Actually, clarification: what I'm saying applies to
| contracts between two sophisticated parties that are
| negotiating.
|
| If I'm Facebook and you're a user, there is no negotiation.
| So I try to make it as air tight as (legally) possible.
| canjobear wrote:
| This is exactly the thesis that is refuted by the article. They
| find that the factors that make legal language hard to
| understand are the same factors that make any language hard for
| anyone to understand, for example long dependencies between
| related words in sentences. Nor do such constructions create
| ambiguities that might be useful later on: they just make the
| text harder for anyone to understand.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I think the reason contracts aren 't readable to laypeople
| is because laypeople aren't the intended audience._
|
| This doesn't make sense. The parties to the contract are
| presumably laypeople, and they have to understand it before
| they agree to it and sign it since one of the legal
| requirements for a valid contract is a meeting of the minds,
| meaning a common understanding between the parties of what each
| of them is agreeing to.
| johndhi wrote:
| While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters and
| readers of significance are almost always lawyers.
|
| If you decide to try to bring a claim against your mortgage
| lender, will you have a lawyer read your mortgage agreement
| before you file suit? Surely.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything of
| significance without first having a lawyer vet the EULA?
|
| Such agreements are already absurdly long for some of the
| most trivial services or products. The answer cannot become
| "be a lawyer or rich enough to afford retaining one".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything
| of significance without first having a lawyer vet the
| EULA?_
|
| I think this focuses attention on the wrong thing.
|
| A counterparty that is acting in good faith will not put
| absurdly long legalese in a contract, because if they are
| acting in good faith, it is in their interest to reach a
| genuine meeting of the minds with you, because fulfilling
| the contract will benefit both of you.
|
| So the first question to ask is, is your counterparty
| acting in good faith? Are they genuinely trying to reach
| a win-win agreement with you, where both sides benefit?
| Or are they just trying to get whatever they can out of
| you, by hook or by crook, without caring whether you
| benefit?
|
| If the answer to that is the latter, your best option is
| to avoid dealing with that counterparty at all. If a
| counterparty is not acting in good faith, no amount of
| legal analysis of contract language can protect you. (And
| that is why I avoid using products and services that have
| those absurdly long EULAs whenever possible.) And if a
| counterparty _is_ acting in good faith, you should be
| able to reach agreement on reasonably simple contract
| language that a lay person can understand.
| zaphar wrote:
| By this reasoning the vast majority of lawyers drafting
| contracts are not acting in good faith because the vast
| majority of lawyers are drafting obtuse unreadable
| contracts. Which is perhaps the case but the current
| reality is that encountering readable contracts is the
| exception not the common case.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There is no such hope, and that _is_ the answer.
|
| Much of this country is set up by and for lawyers, and
| that has consequences.
| johndhi wrote:
| Agree. There is generally little hope of a layperson (or
| even a lawyer typically) of benefitting from a EULA. That
| said, laws separate from the contract might benefit you -
| if Microsoft's software kills your dog, you probably
| can't recover under the contract, but you might be able
| to win a lawsuit against them for breaking the law.
|
| Unfortunately that process is also costly and benefits
| greatly from lawyer involvement. It's a widely known
| problem that it's expensive to navigate the court system.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters
| and readers of significance are almost always lawyers._
|
| I disagree. First, many contracts are not drafted by
| lawyers. Mortgage notes, which you mention, usually are;
| but, for example, a real estate sales contract in most
| states is standard boilerplate language that was drafted by
| realtors, not lawyers.
|
| Second, saying that lawyers have to read the contract if a
| dispute goes to court doesn't mean lawyers "almost always"
| are the readers of significance, since most contracts never
| result in a dispute that goes to court. If a dispute goes
| to court, then of course it is prudent to hire a lawyer to
| represent your interests. But if contract language has done
| its job properly, there will never be a dispute that needs
| to go to court, because both parties--lay people--will have
| had a common understanding of what the contract says and
| will act in good faith to fulfill it.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| IANAL,
|
| How would you prove that? I think there are protected classes
| for that reason, but if some adult outside of such
| classifications signs they could ostensibly renege at any
| point under the pretense that they didn't understand,
| conversely I presume it would necessitate attorneys (or
| similar) at every contract signing to ensure it would be
| binding.
| johndhi wrote:
| Your question is exactly the reason why meeting of the
| minds doesn't solve this problem. It's subjective.
|
| Fyi in practice, signing the document means that you
| understand it, as far as a court is concerned. Contracts
| will often throw in boiler plate like "I am authorized to
| sign this, I've read it, and I understand and agree to it."
|
| The most common way it's successfully challenged is
| "incompetence" - by showing the person who signed it in no
| way could have possibly understood it (e.g. developmentally
| disabled, someone held a gun to their head, don't speak the
| language and the translation was fraudulent, etc).
| ribosometronome wrote:
| IANAL as well, but isn't there a reasonable person standard
| test applied in law, sometimes? It seems like the issue
| here is that reasonable people are expected to not be able
| to parse contracts.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> How would you prove that?_
|
| You don't. Once you sign a written contract, the
| presumption is that there was a successful meeting of the
| minds between the parties. If you later want to claim that
| you didn't have a meeting of the minds with the other
| party, the burden of proof is on you to show that. The
| other party does not have to prove that you did understand
| the contract.
| chaps wrote:
| Yeah. Law is weird and gets weirder when you scrutinize it as
| far as it can be scrutinized, which often happens in court.
|
| Not contract law, but I've been in two years of FOIA litigation
| to resolve a legal interpretation of "would" vs "could", and
| how that applies to a comma-separated list of categories. It's
| beyond maddening how long legal interpretation issues can go on
| for.
|
| It sucks, but sometimes the verbosity is needed to avoid these
| sorts of years-long fights.
| lelandfe wrote:
| You're saying that "center-embedded clauses... passive voice
| structures, and non-standard capitalization" are actually of
| benefit to the clients?
| johndhi wrote:
| I can think of three reasons why they might be:
|
| 1. Your contract is really confusing and looks like it
| benefits the counter party at face value, but actually
| benefits you upon close inspection. These things can help
| with that. It's "dark arts" to apply this technique, and
| there are various shades of gray, but it happens.
|
| 2. It might cost less to have your lawyer correct these
| things. If I (lawyer) correct them and the the other lawyer
| has to read them and debate them with me, we're spending
| client money.
|
| 3. "Non-standard capitalization" for most purposes is
| standard in legal contracts. As lawyers we are more used to
| non standard than standard. I don't know what center-embedded
| means, and for passive voice, I'd need to see the example.
| Passive voice can be helpful as ambiguity can pull more
| possibilities into play, if desired. E.g.: "there shall be no
| fraudulent use of party A's intellectual property" is broader
| than "party b shall not use party a's intellectual property."
| Eleison23 wrote:
| I have started making it a habit to read all Terms of Service and
| EULAs before accepting them, and particularly with financial
| stuff at stake, like opening a new account I need to read all the
| disclosures. Those financial agreements I've found to be
| comparatively well-written.
|
| I also have occasion to sign off on a lot of health care-related
| agreements, and I find these to be very difficult: it's an
| emotional flashpoint for me, the documents are often presented in
| times of stress and the signature is extracted under some sort of
| duress.
|
| Firstly, the health care facilities (and banks and others) now
| uniformly use electronic signature pads and they don't like to
| print the documents anymore. But if you insist, they will print
| them. This is a good pro forma procedure to force them to
| correlate what you're signing what what you've (presumably) read.
| But I've also found that it's nearly pointless to make a fuss
| about reading what you sign, because there's always a Swiss
| cheese of loopholes and convoluted phrasing that will confuse
| you.
|
| Once a few years ago, I "carefully" read and signed off on a
| 3-page document for release of records, but no records were
| produced. (It failed silently, and the onus was on me to follow
| up.) Upon investigation, I found that the health care
| professional had prepared the document for me to authorize me to
| release records to me (rather than for the facility to release
| the facility's records to me). I attribute this to malice on his
| part - he was a jerk, and of course even after I read this
| document with a glaring error, I didn't catch it, either.
|
| Nevertheless, don't let anyone shove an electronic signature pad
| in your hand before you've made an effort to read what you sign.
|
| I've found it useful to read EULAs and TOS, though, for the
| simple fact that they include policies & procedures in case of
| dispute. If you have trouble with a service, you're supposed to
| know the steps for resolution, and if you haven't followed them,
| the service isn't under any obligation to hold your hand and walk
| you through it. The document often includes essential email and
| postal contact addresses, and I guarantee that you'll never find
| those contact addresses ever again if you don't print/save that
| document before ticking the "I agree" checkbox.
|
| So I highly encourage you to make a folder in your cloud storage,
| or on your phone, and make liberal use of "Save/Print as PDF" for
| every TOS, EULA, and legal document that you sign or agree to.
| Eventually, you'll get into a situation, and you'll be thankful
| that you have recourse to the document you signed.
| [deleted]
| f1shy wrote:
| But one of the most basic principles of the legal system, is that
| you cannot defend yourself based on not knowing the law... This
| is a big problem all around the world.
| torginus wrote:
| I think this "poor writing", as in hard to understand writing
| with long backreferences is due to the same reasons as why many
| academics are terrible at explaining things, as well as why
| source code is hard to read.
|
| I should know, others usually like pointing out how terrible I am
| at explaining things. And I think I know why.
|
| When I make a naive attempt at describing a complex,
| interconnected concept, such as a piece of math, or a program
| that does a thing I start with a mental picture - a graph of
| interconnected concepts. Then I try to describe the picture - the
| same way one would describe a painting. I describe each visible
| part separately, often in great detail, then I try to describe
| the links and interconnections between parts.
|
| This sort of 'accurate' descriptive style naturally leads to huge
| backreferences, and people usually have a ton of trouble
| following along.
|
| However I think there's a way of getting your point across - one
| basically needs to reproduce the thought process of how one would
| come up with the given model given the real world constraints,
| illustrating the issue and its proposed solution with examples.
| It is often said that people are much better at deriving the
| rules from a few examples than the other way around.
|
| However this sort of descriptive style takes both a lot of
| effort, and usually is less precise, which often is not
| acceptable, such as in the case of contracts or computer code.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > one basically needs to reproduce the thought process of how
| one would come up with the given model [...] people are much
| better at deriving the rules from a few examples than the other
| way around.
|
| Indeed. I don't think this is as mystifying as some people
| seems to believe. There seem to be at least two errors poor
| communicators make.
|
| The first is that communication doesn't transfer any content
| from one person to the other. We use signs and symbols with
| conventional meanings both parties accept to express things
| which are then interpreted by the other party. If you're not
| both on the same page, you have to first establish that common
| ground. Much of education involves building up that common
| vocabulary and system of signs so that we can even have the
| conversation. To think of communication as if you were some act
| of piping the actually semantic content from your mind to
| another's is to completely misunderstand communication and a
| recipe for failure and frustration because you will be unable
| to understand why someone cannot just grasp the content you
| think you've just poured into their head. "It's right there! I
| just gave it to you!"
|
| This brings us to the second error. Knowing your audience means
| knowing what their current state of knowledge is. Part of that
| is knowing the vocabulary and system of signs your interlocutor
| knows. Explanation is therefore a matter of using what they
| already know to lead them to the conclusions you already have
| (introducing claims as necessary). Once the aim of explanation
| is stated that way, it starts to resemble something like a
| chain of reasoning...or an argument, which it basically is. I
| cannot derive certain theorems if I have not yet derived
| certain prior theorems, much less if I lack the axioms from
| which they are derived.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Good point at the beginning about how serialization of complex
| structures works, but false conclusion.
|
| Good writing, just like good code is well-factored and self-
| documenting. Easy to understand identifiers, short functions.
|
| What you suggesting is the equivalent of writing a module using
| a long string of function calls, some of which have very non-
| obvious meanings, and claiming that there isn't a way to factor
| it out.
| thechao wrote:
| Build a simple model you can explain in a few sentences;
| perhaps accompanied by a simple picture.
|
| Elaborate details in each important direction, separately.
|
| Finally, describe unusual complications that arise when
| different elaborations are combined. Use a narrative voice when
| there's a process to explain (but, be sure to use numbered
| statements!). Use a well-known top-level article structure to
| help familiarize your reader -- but be sure they know to expect
| that structure.
|
| Finally, always edit for clarity.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Explaining something to another human is hard for people "on
| the spectrum", in part because they don't have a strong "theory
| of mind".
|
| Instead of understanding and/or inquiring how the other
| person's mind state differs from yours, and what gradual steps
| might lead them to greater understanding, they tend to treat
| people like a file system with a missing file, and stream the
| relevant data into them, assuming it will all be recorded.
|
| This is not a simple problem to solve, but it can be done, and
| the first step is to realize the nature of the problem.
|
| One simple process is getting feedback along the way. Instead
| of the 5 minute lecture, go step by step, and check that your
| counterpart has picked up what you're putting down.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
| AlbertCory wrote:
| IANAL, but I AM a patent agent, which means I passed the Patent
| Bar. So I haven't dealt in contracts, but a lot of the same
| considerations apply to patent claims.
|
| There is some claim language which is _absolutely_ not required
| and any lawyer who uses it is just showing off. The article
| mentioned "aforesaid" which is a prime example in contracts (in
| patent claims, it's just "said").
|
| For example:
|
| A TCP packet, comprising TCP header and body, where said header
| comprises etc. etc.
|
| -- _or_ --
|
| A TCP packet, comprising TCP header and body, where the header
| comprises etc. etc.
|
| The second is _absolutely_ as valid as the first. "The" is just
| as good as "said."
|
| Another example:
|
| What is claimed and desired to be secured by US Letters Patent,
| is
|
| -- _or_ --
|
| I claim
|
| The first one is just pretentious. It adds nothing.
|
| Maybe you don't like "comprising"? Well, that one _is_
| specialized language.
|
| A chair, comprising four legs, a seat, and a back
|
| -- _or_ --
|
| A chair, consisting of four legs, a seat, and a back
|
| The second is _not_ just as good as the first. "Comprising"
| allows for the chair to have arms, while "consisting of" does
| not.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| In 1990 I worked with a lawyer to submit a patent (cool idea,
| although it never made me any money). We were both new to the
| process, so it was a learning opportunity all around.
|
| A priority of mine was to use clear and transparent language.
| So, I'd write something up that was human-readable, he'd
| legalese it, I'd re-human-readable it, and we'd iterate. It
| felt like we were taking a walk through document space; he'd
| push towards the "Legally Tight" pole, and I'd push towards the
| "Intelligible" pole.
|
| I think the result [0] was pretty good.
|
| [0]: https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
| Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=...
|
| (P.S. Why isn't there a simple PTO URL for "show patent number
| XXXXXXX"???)
| lamontcg wrote:
| Your last example is why reading the law is tricky and why we
| need both a push for plain language and a push to explain
| language that is necessarily very specific.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| In general, yeah, but I have mixed feelings on that
| particular one. Claims wouldn't be _much_ more understandable
| if they said:
|
| A chair, with four legs, a seat, and a back, and possibly
| other elements.
|
| A good explanation for obtuseness in legal language is:
|
| In normal writing, you're trying to be understood. In legal
| writing, you're trying to make it impossible to be
| misunderstood.
| watwut wrote:
| imo, actually they would be more understandable. Because
| that sentence is using words everybody knows.
| chx wrote:
| This here reminds me of George Carlin:
|
| > People add extra words when they want things to sound more
| important than they really are. "Boarding process". Sounds
| important. It isn't. It's just a bunch of people getting on an
| airplane. People like to sound important. Weathermen on
| Television talk about shower activity. Sounds more important
| than showers. I even heard one guy on CNN talk about a rain
| event. I swear to God. He said, "Louisiana's expecting a rain
| event". I said, "holy shit I hope I can get tickets to that!"
|
| > News people like to say "police have responded to an
| emergency situation." No they haven't, they've responded to an
| emergency. We know it's a situation... everything is a
| situation!
| cwillu wrote:
| My personal peave is "utilize": it's just an excuse to use
| the letter "z" in a sentence.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Great example.
|
| Also "access" as in "they can access health care." How
| about "they can receive health care"? "They can get health
| care"?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I'm not a doctor, but there are differences between the
| two words: "access" generally refers to capability and/or
| proximity whereas "receive" generally refers to
| eligibility for a particular service or prescription.
|
| The word "get", is a vague expression of either of the
| former two words, but in common parlance is understood to
| be the latter.
| derbOac wrote:
| The case of "access" I think is partly two avoid two
| things. First, it's to avoid implying that the concern is
| about getting treatment, as opposed to being evaluated
| for it or being set up in the system. Second, it's to
| avoid implying that the potential patient's concern is
| about "getting" something at all, as opposed to being
| eligible for it, in the sense that they could get it if
| it were necessary.
|
| Access as an idea is very important in healthcare equity,
| because it avoids a lot of the political baggage that is
| attached to the less resourced obtaining those resources.
| If you have critics that are accusing the poor of just
| hoarding things, you want to clarify that what they're
| getting is eligibility or entrance, not the resources per
| se. Access is about being able to get drugs if you want
| and need it, not getting drugs per se.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Here's a good example of 'center-embedded clauses' making a
| paragraph difficult to interpret - it's from the revamped USA-
| Canada-Mexico trade deal, specifically a side agreement between
| the USA and Canada on energy-related trade:
|
| > "Each Party shall endeavor to ensure that energy-related
| activities that do not result in a facility exceeding its
| previously authorized capacity and that are limited to performing
| maintenance work on, or ensuring the safety of, existing cross-
| border infrastructure may be undertaken under the initial
| authorization and shall not require a new authorization."
|
| Unpacking all this is rather difficult. The intent appears to be
| ensuring that energy-related activities should not require
| periodic re-authorization by a regulatory body after an initial
| authorization is granted. An example would certainly help - a
| cross-border power grid interconnect, say.
|
| The embedded clauses are of two different kinds. If our grid
| interconnect doubles its capacity, this would be a violation of
| the first (restrictive) clause, and would thus require a new
| round of authorization. Under the second (permissive) clause, one
| can shut down the grid interconnect for safety or maintenance
| reasons. Taking the grid interconnect offline to restrict supply
| and jack up prices would thus be a violation, although one could
| monkey around with this (see Russia shutting down Nordstream to
| Europe for 'maintenance' at present).
|
| That's just one paragraph, the document is hundreds of pages of
| this kind of thing.
| eimrine wrote:
| Is there an interpreter from legal language to human? Here, from
| the comments, I understood that the fact that no one reads the
| licenses is kind of intentional, for reasons that you can find on
| this page. This means that someone has to write a translator.
| thayne wrote:
| I suspect in at least some cases terms of service and privacy
| policies are intentionally hard to read because they don't want
| you to know how one sided they are.
| gumby wrote:
| TBF those structures do exist for a reason. Just take the "Total
| Compensation" as an example. Breaking it out as shown in the
| paper does work, but now some language is repeated; in an edit
| (and most contracts are edited rather than being created _de
| novo_ ) one of the duplicated clauses could be edited and the
| other overlooked, especially if they become separated by
| successive edits.
|
| I'm sure there are obscurantist
| dctoedt wrote:
| The inconsistent-edits problem is a real one; failure to follow
| D.R.Y. cost a Dallas lender $693K because a guaranteed
| repayment amount was written as "one million seven thousand
| dollars ($1,700,000)" and words take precedence over numbers,
| so the lender was repaid $1.07 million and not $1.7 million.
|
| In another example, the agreed deadline for a party to cure a
| breach of contract was written as "fifteen (30) days"; the
| breaching party cured before day 30 but after day 15 -- which
| was too late, because the other party had already terminated
| the contract, and the court agreed that words take precedence
| over numbers.
|
| So D.R.Y. is a sound guideline to follow in contracts (within
| limits; it's _not_ an absolute, ironclad rule).
|
| More: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-
| Draftin...
| abledon wrote:
| One of the pillars of the mars civilization is that all laws
| should be written in clear language
| swayvil wrote:
| The sheer verbosity of the average person on the internet has
| always amazed me. You can't say anything in less than 3 solid
| paragraphs. Sometimes I wonder if the problem is mine. It
| certainly seems a hinderance to communication.
| georgeoliver wrote:
| I couldn't agree more.
|
| If it's true that most in-person communication is non-verbal, I
| wonder if people then try to over-compensate with their prose.
|
| Maybe technical documents need more emoticons.
| Victerius wrote:
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >The top comment in this other HN thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32888730
|
| I don't get it.
|
| That post is great. The lead is at the top. It's highly
| visible and you don't need to read anything else if you don't
| want to.
|
| The rest is just a long form explanation of why they like
| physical books.
| swayvil wrote:
| How in any sane world was your parent comment (by
| Victerius) worthy of death?
| thrown_22 wrote:
| ???
| max51 wrote:
| At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the
| building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on
| structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new
| version to see if we need to implement anything new in our
| software.
|
| For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that
| teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To
| calculates something (eg. a specific wind load or seismic load),
| you just read the section from top to bottom and follow the
| recipe. Things are actually placed in the order that an engineer
| would use them.
|
| With the US code, you have to deal with triple negations and 80%
| of the usefully information is presented as references to other
| sections. It's really not fun trying to understand it when a
| single sentence will link you to 8 paragraphs, 6 of which are in
| a completely different chapters or sub-chapters. And as you can
| imagine, these 8 paragraphs will also have their own references
| to other part of the code. It's a complete mess that is
| impossible to follow unless you write your own summary and/or
| take screenshots and rearrange them in order.
|
| You end up with a situation where even experienced engineers
| can't understand it and have to rely on notes from colleagues,
| college textbooks, calculation examples, or they just blindly
| follow the design software they bought.
|
| Working the support line for a high end structural analysis and
| design software has really opened my as to how incompetent and
| lazy a lot of the senior engineer from highly reputable firm can
| be. It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to
| understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the
| original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| thank you for this reply -- here in California, there is no
| secret that much building activity has been legally curtailed
| to such an extent that it becomes another endeavor entirely..
| that of seeking and obtaining permission at every turn. Obscure
| and contradictory rule books specifically enable this kind of
| gatekeeping IMHO.
| astrange wrote:
| A big problem with US building codes is just there's too many
| of them - every town has its own rules, so you can't share
| knowledge or buildings between them.
|
| Some of the common rules in the US don't help though;
| aesthetic rules like setbacks are pointless and expensive,
| but even the safety rules other countries don't have cause
| big problems. Can't have single stair apartments and
| everything has to be built to accommodate gigantic fire
| trucks.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Consider the following two function definitions:
| int add(int a, int b) { return a + b; }
| int add(int a, int b) { if ((a > 0 && b > 0) &&
| (INT_MAX - a < b)) { return INT_MIN + (b -
| (INT_MAX - a + 1)); } else if ((a < 0 && b < 0) &&
| (INT_MIN - a > b)) { return INT_MAX + (b -
| (INT_MIN - a - 1)); } else { return a
| + b; } }
|
| Which one expresses the intent more simply and understandably?
|
| Which one is more robust?
|
| Which one would you bet the future of your company on?
|
| I offer that, sometimes, simplicity of expression is at odds with
| protection against edge cases.
| kemitchell wrote:
| Don't let lawyers confuse form and substance as cover.
|
| It's perfectly possible to address more possibilities in simple
| language. The result might run longer, but it won't hurt to
| read.
|
| Too many companies run on legal docs execs don't read. Too may
| lawyers write those docs to put readers off. If you want robust
| legal work for your company, maximize accountability for your
| legal advisers. All the usual tools.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Sure. Key word is "sometimes." I'm definitely in favor of
| simpler language when possible, and I think we once spoke
| about my minimalist ISC variant license.
|
| But... we as a profession are still doing _way_ better than
| past generations and their English /Middle French/Latin code-
| switching, talking about beasts _ferae naturae_ like poor
| _reynard_ , with his depredations on farmers and on barn
| yards.
| zaphar wrote:
| Your second function does more work and covers more cases
| certainly but could also be written less confusingly to
| indicate the intent. If I encountered your second function in a
| code review I would at a minimum be asking you to add comments
| to clarify to the reader what is happening.
|
| When the article talks about bad writing they aren't suggesting
| that "simpler" is better. They are suggesting that "clarity" is
| better. By all means cover the edge cases but don't construct
| the legal language so it looks obfuscated INTERCAL.
| deanmen wrote:
| Why not int add(int a, int b) {
| unsigned res = (unsigned) a + (unsigned) b; return
| (int) res; }
| torstenvl wrote:
| "When a value with integer type is converted to another
| integer type ... [if] the new type is signed and the value
| cannot be represented in it; the result is implementation-
| defined." C99, 6.3.1.3.
|
| "When a value with integer type is converted to another
| integer type ... [if] the new type is signed and the value
| cannot be represented in it; either the result is
| implementation-defined or an implementation-defined signal is
| raised." C23 Draft, 6.3.1.3.
|
| Calling add(2147483647, 2147483647) with your code could
| trap, not from the overflow (which is well-defined for
| unsigned integers) but from casting 4294967294 to a signed
| integer.
|
| I also don't know if it would work with one's complement.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| As a general matter writers that try to use a formal voice but
| don't have a lot of practice with it produce writing that is much
| worse than if they just settled for something more casual.
|
| I'm not saying emojis and text-speak but most of the time writers
| shouldn't reach for words or phases that they think sound
| impressive.
| btrettel wrote:
| My experience working as a patent examiner agrees fully with the
| title: legal texts tend to be hard mostly because they're poorly
| written. (DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my
| personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)
|
| I've been trained in patent legal terminology, which isn't that
| bad. Patent documents are still frequently difficult to
| understand. I have one application on my docket where I'm going
| to have to rewrite one of the claims to understand what it's
| saying, and no, that shouldn't be necessary... And the situation
| with patent documents is worse than the situation described in
| the abstract as many attorneys write vaguely.
|
| The argument that "lawyers are the intended audience" isn't
| legally sound either, as under 35 USC 112(a), patents are
| supposed to "enable a person skilled in the art [...] to make and
| use the [invention]". If an attorney argues that patents aren't
| supposed to be understood by non-attorneys, they're wrong, full
| stop.
|
| Unfortunately, I'm not really allowed to do 112(a) enablement
| rejections. I'd do those sorts of rejections frequently if I
| could, but I think I can count the number of times I've done
| 112(a) enablement rejections on one hand. The law in other
| countries seems more strict than in the US. I'm told that Japan
| in particular takes enablement a lot more seriously than the US
| does.
| johndhi wrote:
| If the examiners can't enforce enablement, doesn't that mean it
| isn't a true requirement? And that in fact patents wind up
| being drafted not for the layperson?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Excellent question.
|
| Enablement is a joke in software patents. I actually did
| research on this and "written description", and (from memory)
| some judges have said that you need "structure" in your
| application, and having a box on your diagram labelled
| "access control" can be that structure. A person of ordinary
| skill in the art could construct it from those words. There's
| no need to provide any further details on the access control.
| Before someone points this out: obviously if "access control"
| is not part of the claimed invention, then you don't need to
| specify it beyond a box. But then you probably wouldn't have
| put it in the diagram in the first place.
|
| There's an empirical test that the PTO _could_ do: take some
| software patents and give them to a large sample of people
| skilled in the art (which, if I remember correctly, is often
| two years of relevant experience plus a BS degree in computer
| science). "Relevant experience" would mean "in the field of
| the patent," e.g. if it's automobile battery management
| software, experience in missile guidance doesn't count.
|
| See how many are able to make and practice the invention with
| a "reasonable amount of experimentation."
| btrettel wrote:
| Yes, my personal opinion is that enablement is not a true
| requirement in the US. I think a lot of problems with the
| current patent system would be helped by making the law
| stricter about enablement and also giving the USPTO more
| resources (money, in particular) so that examiners can
| enforce the enablement requirement.
|
| Also, to be clear: Patents legally aren't for laypeople.
| They're for people working in the field of the invention.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience",
| this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot
| proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it:
|
| > The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to
| provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the
| total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general
| elementary and secondary public school purposes on the residence
| homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any
| statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum
| compressed rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed
| for those purposes on the homestead.
|
| I have an Ivy League education and I still could hardly
| understand it, and I still think some of the language is
| ambiguous (i.e. I think "the reduction of the amount of a
| limitation on the total amount" can be interpreted both ways).
|
| https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/03/25/the-lang...
| gnicholas wrote:
| Honestly, the ballotopedia summary [1] isn't much clearer!
| Looks like it passed overwhelmingly (87%), so presumably folks
| knew what it meant from TV ads? Or they were all successfully
| and massively misled by the other side's ads, and they had no
| idea what it meant!
|
| 1:
| https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_1,_Property_Tax_Li...
| amilios wrote:
| The ballotpedia summary shows that there wasn't really a
| campaign opposing the measure it seems? In which case
| presumably it makes sense that it passed overwhelmingly, if
| no one was voicing any arguments against it
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Or people didn't understand it enough to oppose it, or
| interpreted it opposite to the received interpretation and
| so were for it, or didn't have enough money to mount a
| campaign, or assumed others would campaign against it, or
| ...
| behaveEc0n00 wrote:
| When you can just point at a law degree as unfalsifiable proof
| a contract must be legit what is the layman to do?
|
| It could be argued the reason the law is successful (like many
| other "successful" social frameworks in history) is the
| ignorance of the masses.
|
| High minded gossip, hyping story of forever human life and
| expansion is a human tradition.
| zo1 wrote:
| Whoever wrote or approved that should be fired. Whether they
| are a lawyer or politician, it matters not. To parse it one
| needs to write it out, draw brackets around concepts, and then
| add lines between the potentially-grouped concepts because
| there is so much in-between that you forget it all by the time
| you get to the end.
| contravariant wrote:
| Apparently that's just the title, though what the proposition
| does is apparently appending a similarly incomprehensible
| sentence to the state consitution: BE
| IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:
| SECTION 1. Section 1-b, Article VIII, Texas Constitution,
| is amended by adding Subsection (d-2) to read as follows:
| (d-2) Notwithstanding Subsections (d) and (d-1) of this
| section, the legislature by general law may provide for the
| reduction of the amount of a limitation provided by
| Subsection (d) of this section and applicable to a
| residence homestead for a tax year to reflect any
| statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the
| maximum compressed rate, as defined by general law, or a
| successor rate of the maintenance and operations taxes
| imposed for general elementary and secondary public
| school purposes on the homestead. A general law
| enacted under this subsection may take into account
| the difference between the tier one maintenance and
| operations rate for the 2018 tax year and the maximum
| compressed rate for the 2019 tax year applicable to a
| residence homestead and any reductions in subsequent
| tax years before the tax year in which the general law
| takes effect in the maximum compressed rate applicable
| to a residence homestead.
|
| For this reason it should be voted _against_ , as it makes
| the state constitution illegible, but as for what it does I
| haven't a single clue.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't think the wording is the problem. It says what it
| does.
|
| The problem is in the effect of the law.
|
| Article 8 Section 1-b (d) says that an elderly or disabled
| person's property taxes (on their home) can't be increased if
| the money would go to public schools. It also establishes the
| concept that their current (unincreasable) educational
| property taxes are transferable property; they can take this
| "limitation" with them if they move.
|
| However, while it establishes the _concept_ , it doesn't
| _enact_ anything. Section 1-b (d) doesn 't say that people
| can take their limitation with them if they move. It says
| that the legislature is free to make a law allowing them to
| do so:
|
| > The legislature, by general law, may provide for the
| transfer of all or a proportionate amount of a limitation
| provided by this subsection for a person who qualifies for
| the limitation and establishes a different residence
| homestead.
|
| It also has two clauses, which I assume were added by
| amendment, specifying a reduced limitation for the year 1997
| and for the year 2015. I didn't notice any clause authorizing
| the legislature to enact this type of reduction, but they
| seem to have managed to do it all the same.
|
| Anyway, the new subsection also doesn't make any changes to
| the limitation. Like the clause about transferring your
| limitation from one home to another home, this one authorizes
| the legislature to modify the limitation under certain
| circumstances:
|
| > Notwithstanding Subsections (d) and (d-1) of this section,
| the legislature by general law may provide for the reduction
| of the amount of a limitation provided by Subsection (d) of
| this section and applicable to a residence homestead for a
| tax year to reflect any statutory reduction from the
| preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate, as defined
| by general law, or a successor rate of the maintenance and
| operations taxes imposed for general elementary and secondary
| public school purposes on the homestead.
|
| Bad writing isn't the reason this is difficult to understand.
| The reason is that there are too many layers of indirection;
| the system itself is difficult to understand, and therefore
| any description of it will also be difficult to understand.
|
| The only effect of this law appears to be to authorize the
| state legislature to pass laws. They could already do that.
| What is the effect supposed to be?
| AstralStorm wrote:
| I suspect it's a specificity thing to override federal law
| that would allow such redirection of funds as described
| without an explicit law.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There is no redirection of funds involved...
| _raoulcousins wrote:
| Funny that I was about to comment "it doesn't seem so bad,
| just draw a directed graph to work it out". Reading your
| comment it does seem a little unreasonable.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| No ballot initiative should require back-of-the-napkin
| syntactic analysis to understand.
| meowkit wrote:
| A normative statement - which I declare to point out that
| you could also share what should be the case.
|
| What might be more helpful is that ballot initiatives
| should have a stricter template based on type. If you're
| changing tax code it could be:
|
| - Initiative Type: Taxes
|
| - Affects: The homesteads of elders in X, Y, for Z
|
| - Results: Taxes are raised
|
| - Description: _As stated above_
|
| - Definitions: Homesteads - X, Elders - Y, ad valorem -
| etc
|
| Of course this is essentially making the same conclusions
| as the title which is that standard writing/legalese is
| really no longer acceptable given the complexity of many
| modern laws and incentivized parties.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| They were deliberately torturing themselves to avoid
| saying "raise taxes."
|
| What they seem to be saying, if I parsed it correctly:
|
| "We now get to include tax breaks from the previous year
| as a factor in property value when taxing the elderly."
|
| That seems awful. I kind of get the hyper-technicality
| they're going for, but it still seems like they're
| sticking it to seniors... again, if I understood it
| correctly.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| These issues are nuanced. Texas municipalities depend on
| property taxes more than most as there's no state income
| tax.
|
| One thing local government politicians love to do is pass
| tax exemptions for old people, disabled people, veterans
| and combinations of the three. It's a type of patronage,
| that lets Mayor Good 'ol Boy drop by the senior center
| and VFW and pull in the votes.
|
| Property taxes are essentially allocating the levy based
| on your proportional share of value. When they get out of
| control in small towns the effect is a two-tier system
| where some people pay dramatically more.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I'm not 100% certain I understand it, but I see 3 sections
| in there:
|
| The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to
| provide for the reduction of the amount of
|
| a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that
| may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public
| school purposes on the residence homestead of a person who
| is elderly or disabled
|
| to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax
| year in the maximum compressed rate of the maintenance and
| operations taxes imposed for those purposes on the
| homestead.
| Victerius wrote:
| > I have an Ivy League education and I still could hardly
| understand it
|
| Downvote for arrogance. An Ivy League education doesn't mean
| you're smarter.
| xhevahir wrote:
| The assumption of most of the comments here is that bad writing
| is a matter of incompetence, but in the case of public policy I
| think Hanlon's Razor no longer applies. Given what we know
| about Texas politics and American ballot measures in general,
| it's quite possible that the ambiguity was introduced
| deliberately to give big landowners (or rather their lawyers)
| extra wiggle room. If that's true then the only communications
| for which the public were the intended audience are the
| advertisements, which I'm sure bore no resemblance to the text
| of the law.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not even the writing - it can be blatant
| misinterpretation. There's precedential opinion that states
| that you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's
| spirt. Yet there's a law that has "reasonable care" in it,
| but the precedential opinion on that is that it's a strict
| liability offense because 'applying reasonable care would
| frustrate enforcing the legislature's intent'...
|
| The judges don't care. They're not impartial. They want the
| state to win more often than not. I mean, who pays their
| salary and what looks better than being part of law and
| order?
|
| It can also be intentional deception. Look at the recent PA
| vote on retirement age of judges removing the language that
| provided voters info on the current age limit.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I haven't researched it heavily, but wasn't that also true
| for the 2nd amendment? I doubt all the folks that ratified it
| agreed on its meaning.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That might be true of all the early amendments, given that
| they aren't painstakingly defined like modern laws. It
| might also be that they did agree (the ones who voted for
| it) and it's lost to history (federalist and antifederalist
| papers have some background, as do the similar state level
| constitutional provisions about arms, the press, etc).
| hackingthenews wrote:
| Hanlon's razor never applies when politics or money is
| involved. Best to just suspend your judgement instead of
| giving politicians the benefit of the doubt.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Looking at Texas school funding laws, I expect the complexity
| is aimed at Charter Schools.
|
| I didn't look into the details, but schools with poor
| attendance can have their "excess" local revenues claimed by
| the state (state law specifies what excess means). Charter
| schools don't have local funding (and can play games to pick
| their students).
|
| The measure above appears to be for adjusting a relief
| measure for the elderly and disabled downwards when their
| obligation is reduced (which if it only reduces the relief,
| could reduce it to 0 over time).
| [deleted]
| bluechair wrote:
| I've rewritten the clause by moving "prepositional phrases"
| into the noun phrases to avoid as much nesting as possible. For
| example, instead of saying "the husband of the woman, I'd
| replace it with the woman's husband."
|
| Here's what I think it says: "This constitutional amendment
| authorizes the legislature to set the ad valorem taxes total
| reduction amounts that may be imposed for general elementary
| and secondary public school purposes on the residence homestead
| of an elderly or disabled person in order to reflect any
| statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the
| maintenance maximum compressed rate and operations taxes
| imposed for those purposes on the homestead."
| falcolas wrote:
| Frankly, it's still pretty obnoxious. And that's not on you,
| that's on the original.
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| Aren't such long phrases horrible writing, kind of by
| default?
| watwut wrote:
| You can have long readable phrases. The long phrase is bad
| rule is just beginner helper, nothing more nothing less.
| oblio wrote:
| Almost nothing can save a phrase that's 100+ words
| long[1], no matter who you are.
|
| [1] With some exceptions, such as enumerations.
| jmugan wrote:
| Wow, I actually had to vote on that and couldn't parse out what
| it was saying, so I left that one blank. I have a PhD, it's in
| computer science, but still.
| [deleted]
| nwiswell wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, if the ballot measure is
| incomprehensible, you're safe in voting against it (which,
| obnoxiously enough, can sometimes mean voting yes)
|
| There is never a good reason for using language this obtuse,
| but there's lots of bad reasons.
|
| This measure in particular seems engineered to be just clear
| enough to be upheld by a judge, but also sufficiently
| obfuscated so that the public doesn't know what it's actually
| voting on.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The number one problem with this language is that everything is
| inlined because they don't have the concept of macros or
| variables. They have some variables but they are all ad-hoc
| designed into the language. For instance: ad-valorem means
| something but it's all from history. Adding a new term is a
| huge effort in this language.
|
| Secondarily, they don't have a concept of macros except in a
| very ad-hoc sense. This means that they are afraid of macro use
| because they do not know the concepts of macro hygiene.
|
| This is likely due to intentional creating a moat around the
| industry.
|
| tl;dr Legalese is impenetrable because it uses the equivalent
| of Forth but POSIWID
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't know about that, for example contracts usually define
| their terms as they go along. "Hereinafter referred to
| as...". That's basically a #define macro.
| johndhi wrote:
| Lol. Brutal
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Are you an attorney?
|
| I have a relative who worked in bill drafting for a
| legislature. The structure of this stuff is sort of it's own
| art driven by the deadlines as a lot of legislation is
| associated with things with deadlines like budget bills.
|
| This isn't the king's English, but it isn't egregiously unclear
| if you understand what it's about.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I disagree with the assumption that the intent is for voters to
| understand what they are voting for. The purpose is to either
| get the vote or not. And language games, including intentional
| trickery, are a legally valid way of accomplishing either goal.
| hnick wrote:
| I wonder if it's a programmer thing, but as I read that I
| realised I was mentally bracketing related words together
| almost like a token parser to build a syntax tree.
| coldtea wrote:
| Poor incentives and interests in obscuration, not poor skills,
| drive poor writing in legal language
| mistrial9 wrote:
| perhaps you mean "incentives" and "obfuscation"
| coldtea wrote:
| I did mean incentives (typo), but obscuration seems fitting:
| "the action of hiding or concealing something", even if
| obfuscation might be a better fit.
| dqpb wrote:
| Writing laws and contracts in natural language is kind of insane
| given that they are formal specifications.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Lawyer and contract-drafting teacher here. The biggest problem
| with unreadable contracts is that we have too many L.O.A.D.s:
| Lazy Or Arrogant Drafters. (You can decide for yourself: L.O.A.D.
| of what?) There's a relevant Dilbert cartoon: [0]
|
| To simplify contract language, the biggest bang for the buck
| comes from SSSP: Short, Single-Subject Paragraphs, which are much
| easier to read; to review and revise during contract
| negotiations; and to reuse in other contracts.
|
| (It's not unlike modularity and orthogonality in software.)
|
| For more ranting on that subject -- with some pathological
| before-and-after examples -- see my online course materials (this
| version isn't pretty; I'm almost done refactoring it). [1]
|
| [0] https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-08-28
|
| [1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-
| Draftin...
| titanomachy wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. As you said, there is a very clear
| analogy to software factoring. Separating the definition of
| terms from the clauses relating them is very similar to
| factoring software logic out into functions.
|
| In a way, bad legalese is even worse: at least hard-to-read
| code can be still be effortlessly and quickly executed by a
| computer. Every "execution" of your example contract will give
| someone a headache.
| bhawks wrote:
| In your experience how much of this is attributable to a party
| of the contract trying to sneak favorable terms into the
| agreement? Generally I am a fan of Hanlon's razor, assume
| ignorance/stupidity over maliciousness, but given the nature of
| the subject matter I am very suspicious.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _how much of this is attributable to a party of the
| contract trying to sneak favorable terms into the agreement?_
|
| I've long thought there's sometimes some of that. But I
| preach to my students that it's not smart to try to sneak
| something in, buried in a "wall of words," because it
| presupposes that the other party's reviewer won't spot it and
| get pissed off.
| randcraw wrote:
| Poor writing is the main cause for the illegibility of referreed
| science and engineering articles too. Historically this was
| partly due to publishers' demand that the article be quite short
| (often < 8-10 pages). Of course, this constraint is obsolete now
| that pubs are electronic.
|
| In addition to a format guide, every journal should specify a
| style guide (like the NY Times does), so the reader can expect a
| highly structured layout AND argument. (Explanatory content can
| go in 1+ supplement docs.) I'd even like to see standards for the
| use of emphasis (like bold, italics, colored text), especially
| for first mention of term/names that occur repeatedly.
|
| The sooner we can make all professional writing trivial to skim,
| the better.
| westurner wrote:
| Which attributes of a person are necessary to answer a legal
| question?
|
| Python: def has_legal_right(person: dict, right:
| str): -> bool assert person assert right
| # return NotImplementedError def
| have_equal_rights(persons: list): -> bool return
| NotImplementedError
|
| Javascript: function hasRight(person, right) {
| console.assert(person); console.assert(right);
| // return true || false; } function
| haveEqualRights(persons) { // return true || false;
| }
|
| Maybe Lean Mathlib or Coq?
|
| ... Therefore you've failed at the Law of Reciprocity.
| gersh wrote:
| Isn't a lot of legal language intentionally written to be hard to
| understand? Doesn't that drive up billing hours for lawyers, and
| benefit those with the most lawyers?
|
| Could we have more rules that difficult to understand language
| isn't enforceable? Could courts do more to rule against contracts
| that have poor language?
| raincom wrote:
| The plausible explanation for "center-embedded clauses"(CAC) is
| this: whenever there is an issue of ambiguity about a concept in
| the main clause, CAC will clarify that ambiguity. If one makes
| CAC as an independent clause, this independent clause can
| clarify, or reduce ambiguity, in all clauses of that paragraph or
| the whole contract (all paragraphs). In some unforeseen
| circumstances, making CACs as independent clauses may cause
| problems.
|
| I see CACs as footnotes, directly attached to the clause.
| aliyeysides wrote:
| Shameless plug here but my startup's mission is to solve this
| problem. It seems wrong to me that in this day and age you have
| to hire someone to be able to read a legal document or TOS:
| https://layman.ai/
| johndhi wrote:
| This is interesting. I was thinking while reading this thread
| that it would be cool if there was a way to solve the problem.
|
| My idea: get a significant percentage of users of a service to
| sign up for a 'union' of sorts to negotiate on their behalf. So
| you will boycott Facebook, along with 10million others, until
| they adjust their terms to at least make more sense (or ideally
| be a little more user friendly).
| Quarrel wrote:
| I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere,
| and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places).
|
| I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots
| more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of
| the profession).
|
| In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and
| abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for
| archaic language, creating a worse barrier to entry. Most other
| countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english"
| language push in both contract & legislation, while the US has
| stuck to "this language is proven through precedent" more
| stubbornly than anywhere else. This seems to be particularly
| prevalent in IP law, although that might be my tech bias showing.
|
| I would very much argue against those (even in this thread), that
| say that the lay-person isn't the intended audience for lots of
| contracts, particularly for T&Cs where they are often written by
| a contracts lawyer, for a contracts lawyer or judge, but should
| ABSOLUTELY be written for the lay-person to understand.
|
| Anyway, I think the legal profession can & should do better.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > _Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a
| "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation_
|
| The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter,
| Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It
| has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch
| agencies to use plain language in any official document they
| produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contracts
| exist, though I'm less aware of that.
|
| See: https://centerforplainlanguage.org/2021-federal-plain-
| langua...
|
| And: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/
| troad wrote:
| The US really does lag behind on this one; the push for plain
| English was phenomenally more successful in other Anglophone
| common law jurisdictions.
|
| Having practised as a lawyer in one of them, I can confirm
| much contemporary American legal writing seems absurd and
| even comical. There's something amateurish about it; like a
| layman trying to ad-lib some law talk at a party by cobbling
| together some obscure law terms he's overheard.
|
| "The first party of the aforementioned party - THIS PART IS
| IN CAPS - will henceforth wheretofore undertake that by no
| later than St Swithen's Day - MORE CAPS MEANS MORE LAW - "
| Quarrel wrote:
| Yet the references you give are super recent. I guess that
| highlights my point somewhat?
|
| This has been an issue since before Clinton (ie before my
| commercial experience) at the least.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I feel like this happens in Canada too because federal (and
| lots but not all provincial ("state")) law/websites/guides
| has to be bilingual and they'll have equal force. If the
| translations don't mean exactly the same thing, hilarity
| ensues!
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25.
| ..
| johndhi wrote:
| Tangent: Montreal francinization laws are such a pain in
| the ass.
| zwkrt wrote:
| On the other hand, if it's been championed since Nixon, that
| means his problem is not solved.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Nixon was the last "liberal" president. Not really
| surprising no meaningful reform has been pushed through
| since him
| lelandfe wrote:
| Yeah, I doubt it ever will be.
|
| Reading some of these before/afters gives me hope, though:
| https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/
|
| Before:
|
| > _This form will be used by Federal agencies to obtain
| applicant certification that States which have established
| a review and comment procedure in response to Executive
| Order 12372 and have selected the program to be included in
| their process, have been given an opportunity to review the
| applicant's submission._
|
| After
|
| > _If your State requires an opportunity to review your
| application, use this form to certify that you have done
| so. Include the form in your application._
| johndhi wrote:
| I tend to disagree. US law does require "plain language" in
| certain places (privacy policies for example) and that doesn't
| help. Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer
| language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and
| enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their
| legal requirements are harder to decipher.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Yeah, the EU one can be quite an issue.
|
| Often the EU "principle" that is then enshrined in individual
| country's laws is fairly straight forward. However, you
| _really_ need to understand the individual country and their
| regulator to understand their take on it and enforcement.
| There can be a huge disparity between countries, despite all
| being rooted in the same principle.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| American patents are written in a language that isn't English.
| It's very precise if you can learn to read it, though. The same
| seems to hold for contracts, but to a lesser degree.
| [deleted]
| btrettel wrote:
| I'm a patent examiner and I can't agree with "It's very
| precise if you can learn to read it". A large fraction of
| patent applications I've worked on are unclear. I even wrote
| a linter to help catch some problems:
| https://github.com/btrettel/plint
|
| (DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal
| opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)
|
| Edit: I will agree that patent claims _can_ be precise, but
| so can normal English. I think patent claims are too often
| not precise.
| dctoedt wrote:
| I'm curious what you think about a post I did ten years
| ago, on "defying" the Single Sentence Rule when drafting
| patent claims: https://www.oncontracts.com/multi-sentence-
| claims/
| btrettel wrote:
| Your proposed claim format would greatly improve clarity.
|
| I particularly like the definitions and examples being
| included in the claims. Too often patent attorneys define
| terms contrary to their ordinary meaning. I might not
| think to check the specification for a definition, and
| end up wasting a lot of time.
|
| With that being said, I sometimes do 112(b) rejections
| for exemplary language in claims as they can make the
| claims unclear (for example: "for example"). I think if
| the claim or specification was written to make it clear
| that the examples are just examples and not limiting the
| claim then it would be okay.
|
| Reference numbers are common in patent claims outside of
| the US, but it seems that US patent attorneys worry that
| adding reference numbers would limit the breadth of the
| claims. There's no statute or USPTO rule against
| reference numbers in the claims and I'm not aware of any
| case law justifying not adding them. Not having reference
| numbers in the claims is a loss for clarity, particularly
| when the claims use different terminology than the
| specification (which is unfortunately common).
|
| (Again, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO,
| US govt., etc.)
| ok_dad wrote:
| How do you become a patent examiner? Could anyone do it for
| their area of expertise or is it more like being a
| specialized researcher specifically for patent
| applications?
| btrettel wrote:
| Apply on USAJOBS:
| https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?k=patent+examiner
|
| Looks like the USPTO is hiring in multiple areas right
| now.
|
| It might take a couple attempts to get hired. I was
| rejected the first time I applied.
|
| The USPTO doesn't care much about an applicant's
| background aside from whether the applicant has a
| technical degree. New examiners with expertise in
| particular areas probably won't be assigned to their
| areas of expertise, even if there's a strong demand for
| examiners in those areas. Yes, this makes no sense, but
| it's how the USPTO operates at the moment. I had zero
| experience with the areas I was assigned before I became
| an examiner.
|
| (Again, this is all just my opinion, not that of the
| USPTO, US govt., etc.)
| rozab wrote:
| Wow, this is fascinating. Do you know how many examiners
| are using this tool? Why did you choose to make the default
| configuration more nitpicky than yourself, and is this the
| config you use when running the tool?
| btrettel wrote:
| I'm not aware of any other examiners who use this tool. I
| did ask an examiner I know to try it and they did, but
| they didn't find it useful. They suggested that the
| warnings that plint returns are more relevant to the
| areas I examine than what they examine, which is fair.
| They also found my syntax for antecedent basis checking
| to be confusing.
|
| The personal reason why I made it nitpicky is that
| there's a huge variability between examiners in terms of
| which rejections to make. I'm a junior examiner, so
| everything I do has to be approved by someone else. They
| might tell me to remove a certain rejection because they
| don't have a problem with that, and to add some other
| rejections for things they care about. In my view, it
| would be better to get a wide range of possible
| rejections upfront and then think about which ones the
| person signing off on the office action cares about. The
| alternative is going back and forth about which
| rejections to do, which would take more time.
|
| The JSON configuration file I use filters out a bunch of
| the rules because the person who signs my office actions
| right now doesn't care about those ones, or I don't care
| about those ones. I need to update the README file to say
| that.
|
| Also, an attorney writing a patent application has much
| less information about which rejections are likely than I
| do. So from the perspective of an attorney, I think being
| nitpicky makes sense too. Not that I'm aware of any
| attorneys who use plint.
|
| plint might not even be nitpicky enough. Recently
| r/patentexaminer had a poll [0] where about 6% of
| examiners said that the term "at least one" was
| indefinite... which is astounding to me as I think that's
| totally fine from a definiteness standpoint. As I recall,
| I have some warnings in my linter for enablement on that
| in case it's not clear how having two or more of
| something would work if only one is disclosed. But
| usually "at least one" is fine from an enablement
| perspective.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/xfvs
| rs/at_l...
|
| (Again, my posts here are only my opinion, not that of
| the USPTO, US govt., etc.)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Usually when people say this, they mean the claims. The
| specification, which most engineers read, are not constrained
| by legal precedent.
| akie wrote:
| This is the same in any advanced academic field. Ever tried
| talking to a sociologist or a philosopher?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| how about a museum historian !! I have a large vocabulary, and
| after a certain presentation, it seemed obvious to me that
| anytime one word could be used, three obscure words were its
| replacement.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all
| to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my
| eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I
| figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on the
| list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until
| finally I said to myself "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence
| slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means."
|
| > So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very
| carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close
| to this: "The individual member of the social community often
| receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went
| back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means?
| "People read."
|
| > Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could
| translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty
| business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to
| the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I
| couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered
| it, there was nothing to it.
|
| -- Richard Feynman
| bertil wrote:
| This is absolutely the same with science.
| rickard wrote:
| I think that it's pretty relevant that this is from this year's
| Ig Nobel prize winner in literature:
| https://news.mit.edu/2022/mit-cognitive-scientists-win-ig-no...
| kfarr wrote:
| I wish I could find the original link but I remember years ago a
| HN submission from a startup doing document summarization. The
| founder was on the discussion and responding to question about
| what documents are not possible to summarize with his software.
| Their response was after lots of research they determined that
| legal documents are the most challenging to summarize because
| _they are intentionally obfuscated_
| jakub_g wrote:
| My father recently got a letter from a law office. What it wanted
| to convey was "we saw you sent a bank transfer to Bob lately..."
| (this was not stated implicitly but it's the only way how they
| could get address to send the letter) - "FYI Bob owes us 10k,
| please don't send him any money anymore, instead send it to us
| directly; or if you send to his account we'll take it anyway"
| (now that I'm thinking about it, this could be a nice scam
| tactic, but I'm pretty sure that one was legit).
|
| Anyway, the letter was written in such lingo that on first
| reading it was as if my father owed Bob 10k. Some elderly person
| receiving such letter could have had a stroke.
| gnicholas wrote:
| A lot of this is driven by inertia. When a lawyer goes to write a
| contract, she'll typically start with a prior contract or form
| agreement. This will either be used as a template, or large
| chunks will be borrowed and modified as needed. In either case,
| the lawyer is unlikely to reword a bunch of provisions in an
| attempt to improve readability. It's like the legal version of
| Chesterton's Fence -- if you don't know why a particular clause
| is phrased a particular way, you leave it as-is. Your
| client/partner might ding you if you include a boilerplate
| provision you shouldn't have, but you'd probably get in more
| trouble if you affirmatively reworded something and broke a
| cross-reference or other logical linkage that was supposed to
| remain in place.
|
| As a result, language that was written a long time ago is still
| circulating in modern agreements. Note: I'm not defending any of
| this. As a lawer-turned-founder, I try to keep my agreements as
| short as possible!
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| > (b) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from
| working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic
| dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of
| specialized legal knowledge;
|
| It seems like a misrepresentation to call "long-distance
| syntactic dependencies" in a legal document the same thing as
| poor writing when comparing to other genres of written English
| including those that are written for pleasure. When exploring law
| the question an individual usually has is "If I do X, does Y
| happen?". But legal frameworks don't cover individual situations,
| they paint broad strokes over the human experience.
| johndhi wrote:
| I'm guessing what they mean with long distance dependencies is
| section 3 of the contract sets one scenario and section 46 an
| exception to it.
|
| This happens (normally, intentionally) when there is a section
| up front or at the end that sets defined terms. It also happens
| in a way we lawyers agree kind of sucks but whatever who cares
| - when after a long negotiation we're adjusting one small point
| and don't want to go through the effort and consternation of
| rewriting the whole thing.
|
| Legal negotiation culture states that the longer/more involved
| your edits, the more presumptively unreasonable they are. So
| there is low incentive to rewrite something to make it "read
| better."
| Jtsummers wrote:
| No need to guess, they give an example of the kind of thing
| they mean:
|
| > "In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company
| (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and
| benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter
| referred to as the 'Total Payments'), would be subject to
| excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be
| reduced."
|
| "center-embedding" is the term they use to describe this,
| note the long interruption of the primary sentence due to the
| embedding. A suggested alternative which removes the
| embedding making the primary sentence easier to understand:
|
| > "In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company
| would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance
| payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the
| Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the 'Total
| Payments.' This includes the payments and benefits under
| Section 3(a) hereof."
| YawningAngel wrote:
| > But legal frameworks don't cover individual situations, they
| paint broad strokes over the human experience.
|
| If that doesn't cohere with the questions individuals exploring
| the law actually have, maybe that isn't a good way for legal
| frameworks to be designed?
| johndhi wrote:
| This is a very complicated proposal you've made but I think
| the main answer is, it isn't scalable for policymakers or
| even courts to consider everyone's individual situation a
| priori. It would cost too much money.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| It seems to me that our existing legal system costs an
| enormous amount of money, in that it produces laws that
| can't be usefully engaged with by lay people without
| expensive expert advice. It just conveniently externalises
| this cost on to people who aren't policymakers.
| giantg2 wrote:
| A lot of cases hinge on definitions and wording. It's pretty
| common that bad writing is involved. It's pretty common that the
| theory of law is also in contradiction with many opinions (eg
| strict construction).
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