[HN Gopher] MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomp...
___________________________________________________________________
MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible
style
Author : keepamovin
Score : 272 points
Date : 2024-12-17 03:52 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| Swizec wrote:
| Is legalese not just the result of trying to use English as a
| programming language? Any time I try to write English (or other
| natlang) precisely and unambiguously and robust against
| adversarial interpretations, it comes out looking like legalese.
| the_clarence wrote:
| It's verbose english with a stubborn attitude against any kind
| of formatting. Maybe I'm part of the problem here. BRB.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Natural language is indeed ambiguous. Words tend to vary in
| meaning from time to time. So legal documents gave to precisely
| define a lot of terms, and Latin is also used (because meanings
| there dont change.)
|
| Take the phrase "Open Source" as an example. Us old folk
| ascribe specific meaning to that term - typically based on the
| legalese in Open Source licenses.
|
| However the next generation have imbued it with their own
| (various) definitions. This leads to endless back and forth.
| For example I recently pointed out that SQLite is Public
| Donain, not Open Source. (With predictable pushback.) Today, in
| other thread someone claimed "its not really open Source unless
| its in git, and on github".
|
| And the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is
| seldom understood.
|
| So yeah, legal documents are gard to parse because they can't
| take "common meaning" for granted.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > "its not really open Source unless its in git, and on
| github".
|
| Heh, mine is even more strict: to me, it's not really open
| source unless I can _build_ it since if I cannot compile the
| project, I cannot change it for my needs and /or send those
| tested changes back upstream
|
| I have a second 2nd level "requirement" about packaging it in
| a sane distribution format, because I don't think any
| reasonable person wants to have a .desktop file that is $(cd
| /home/src/foo; npx run whatever "$@"). I'm looking at you,
| Chromium, since I can get it to build just fine but count the
| number of hand-rolled /usr/bin/install calls https://github.c
| om/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b... because
| evidently the $(make DESTDIR= install) is just kidding
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or like the old quip: "Free as in speech, not free as in
| beer."
| Gigachad wrote:
| Open source only became confusing because Richard stallman
| made it his life mission to try to redefine the meaning of
| free in a way that would confuse people for decades to come.
| liontwist wrote:
| There is no open source without stallman. After decades of
| advocacy and organizing his ideas have been moderated for
| mainstream success.
|
| Work on big technical projects like Linux was also a strong
| signal for employers. For years now that signal has been a
| target to emulate so a. Lot of "open source" became FAANG
| resume building.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Aside from the few proposals that I know of to literally use
| programming languages in laws, I have wondered if actually
| _lowering_ the language expressiveness would help (e.g.
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia )
|
| The thinking being that the less nuanced the vocabulary, the
| less ways it could be interpreted and thus one may not have to
| write so many laywerly guard phrases to artificially constrain
| "normal" vocabulary. It may very well run the risk of having to
| use a bazillion more cross-references as one builds up a
| "library" of word-subroutines, but still could be a net win
|
| But I guess I can navel-gaze all I like because for this
| specific domain, _any_ change might as well be _all_ the
| changes since there 's no prayer
| caseyohara wrote:
| The US government has the Plain Language movement which is
| rewriting policy and legal documents in clear, plain
| language.
|
| The plainlanguage.gov site is an excellent all-around writing
| resource. I direct junior developers here when they are
| trying too hard to sound fancy when communicating technical
| concepts in documentation and design documents.
|
| Here are some great examples:
|
| https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
| after/ambi...
|
| https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
| after/mont...
|
| https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
| after/use-...
| mdaniel wrote:
| > The Plain Writing Act of 2010 was signed on October 13,
| 2010. The law requires that federal agencies use clear
| government communication that the public can understand and
| use.
|
| well, no shit! that's amazing
|
| Thanks so much for bringing that to my attention, I'll try
| to see how I can incorporate those into my own process
| kookamamie wrote:
| [X] Good.
| aurareturn wrote:
| This is a great resource for UX design as well.
| archermarks wrote:
| Wow TIL. Those before and afters are awesome and I have
| definitely seen this showing up in government documents.
| Thanks for sharing.
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's a great initiative, but even with these, I feel
| there's further opportunity to make these clearer.
|
| As a particular example, is there any reason to keep the
| vague "second month" in the second example [2], rather than
| "subsequent month" or "next month"?
|
| [2] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-
| after/mont...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Yeah it's not that clear to me. My interpretation would
| be that if I'm reporting (whatever that means) April,
| then May would be the first month following, and hence
| June would be the second month following. Hence the last
| day I could submit would be June 15th (paper) or June
| 25th (electronic).
| falcor84 wrote:
| Oh, wow, I think you're absolutely right and I entirely
| misread that (supposedly "plain") explanation. Having an
| example, like the one you gave, in the text would be
| really useful!
| iterateoften wrote:
| Lots of ambiguity with "next". It's always so hard to
| describe "next Wednesday" if it's Monday or "next week"
| if it's Saturday.
|
| My friends from non English countries get very confused
| that somehow "next Wednesday" when it's Monday might not
| mean two days from now but 8 days from now. And how two
| days in that instance would be referred as "this
| Wednesday" or "this coming Wednesday"
|
| Which is different way of talking. If you were sitting by
| the road counting cars and you are at car "n", Saying
| "the next car" would refer to car n+1. If your counting
| wednesdays you experienced "next Wednesday" technically
| refers to n+2
|
| I stopped saying "this <day>" or "next <day>" and now
| just say "Wednesday the 25th" for instance.
| pxc wrote:
| > It's always so hard to describe "next Wednesday" if
| it's Monday
|
| 'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar
| week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter
| what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is
| _always_ the Wednesday of current week on the calendar--
| even if that day is in the past.
|
| Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean
| 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely.
| But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it
| actually does mean.
|
| > I stopped saying "this <day>" or "next <day>" and now
| just say "Wednesday the 25th" for instance.
|
| I love this. Indexicals in general can be tricky, and I
| love expressions that rely less or very little at all on
| context. Sometimes when a friend is telling a complicated
| story I'll ask them to repeat something tbey just said
| but with no use of pronouns, for instance, and it always
| makes interpretation much easier.
|
| As much as I think the actual idioms are perfectly
| describable, they are somewhat prominently misused. One
| of my pet peeves is how YouTube's search filters uses its
| time restriction phrases incorrectly: it says 'today' to
| mean 'within the past 24 hours', 'this week' to mean
| 'within the past week', 'this year' to mean 'within the
| past year', etc. It's Tuesday, and when I search for
| videos with an upload date from 'this week', I get
| results including videos uploaded 4 days ago, but this
| week is not yet 4 days old under any standard convention
| (e.g., starting the week on Mondays rather than
| Sundays)... -_-
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Your pattern of:
|
| '<term>' is always <my definition>; doesn't matter <other
| factor>.
|
| Is never going to be true in spoken language. Otherwise
| we wouldn't be having conversations about confusion and
| ambiguity in the first place.
| pxc wrote:
| At any given time, the lexicon is evolving and some
| idioms are expanding or on the verge of extinction.
| Still, there are uses of words and phrases that can
| reasonably be described as simply wrong at a given time,
| based on a failure to understand the idiom whose
| invocation is being attempted. Errors that are
| sufficiently popular and persistent will eventually just
| reshape the language, but for a time even an error that
| is pretty popular or fairly long-lived is still
| recognizable as an error.
|
| By my intuition, I'd say the uses of 'this week' and
| friends I described as improper qualify handily, not
| being all that widespread yet. A couple more marginal
| examples that stand out to me because erroneous uses are
| much more common: 'let alone' (which is binary and often
| used with subject and object reversed), the distinction
| between envy and jealousy.
|
| You can take up a radical descriptivist position, e.g.,
| that anything spoken by adult native speakers of normal
| faculties is never erroneous, or re-scope my assertions
| by saying that I'm gatekeeping speakers who see such
| usage as correct from my perceived language community or
| tradition, whatever, but imo the first is trivial and the
| second boring.
|
| Sometimes specialists misappropriate methodological
| constraints from their discipline as general ontological
| or social principles, often discounting an inherent
| normativity in the way people actually relate to the
| things those specialists study. I think that's
| essentially at the heart of the most inflated and
| controversial uses of concepts like cultural relativism
| and linguistic descriptivism, and probably applies to
| nonspecific objections like the one you make above (as
| opposed to pointing at some specific dialectal variation
| in the use of such phrases or something like that).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the
| calendar week following the current calendar week;
| doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is.
| 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week
| on the calendar-- even if that day is in the past.
|
| Nope. This is highly contingent on "which day of the week
| starts a week" conventions.
|
| If it is Sunday, then "next Wednesday" does not clearly
| mean the day 10 days from now ... and which one you lean
| toward will depend (in part) on "week starts on Monday"
| or "week starts on Sunday".
| pxc wrote:
| Yes, the boundaries of the calendar week is a convention
| that varies and impacts the description I gave in a
| straightforward and obvious way, so you can expect
| complications with different conventions on the
| boundaries of each week. :)
|
| Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the
| fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the
| same pattern as I described before, but in a way
| consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather
| than Sunday-- even though calendars here conventionally
| start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of
| week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.
|
| Anyhow, the variation you are getting at is already
| captured in the description I gave: as the _calendar_
| (week boundaries) varies, so does the description 's
| meaning. The description is already indexed to a
| particular calendar (as is the expression, unfortunately
| implicitly). :p
|
| My claim was that the meaning is easy enough to describe,
| not that the phrase is unambiguous. That a phrase can be
| used ambiguously doesn't mean that
| descriptions/definitions/characterizations of its general
| meaning actually have to be ambiguous or vague
| themselves.
|
| Still yeah, this is a real problem for conversations
| between people who aren't looking at the same
| calendar/don't understand a shared convention for week
| boundaries.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the
| fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the
| same pattern as I described before, but in a way
| consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather
| than Sunday-- even though calendars here conventionally
| start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of
| week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.
|
| My sense is that weekend nomenclature is even more
| confusing.
|
| If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager
| there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at
| least) who would understand that to mean the two day
| period that starts in roughly another 4 days. That is:
| "next weekend" referred to at any time before (possibly)
| Friday means "the next one to occur", not "the one that
| is a part of the next calendar week". By contrast, on
| Friday "next weekend" pretty clearly means the two days
| that will occur in about 7 days, rather than "this
| weekend" meaning the two days that start in less than 24
| hours.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _' Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the
| calendar week following the current calendar week;
| doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is.
| 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week
| on the calendar-- even if that day is in the past.
|
| Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean
| 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely.
| But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it
| actually does mean._
|
| That's the way it's supposed to be, at least as spoken in
| the part of Scotland from where my family hails.
|
| But the Americans I know seem to get it wrong about half
| the time.
|
| What I haven't figured out is if it's a regional
| (dialectical) thing, or just certain people being
| "dense", or simply never having been taught the rule.
| caseyohara wrote:
| I've lived in the US my whole life and I don't recall
| anyone ever getting it wrong. Except this scene in
| Seinfeld which is obviously Jerry being pedantic for
| comedic effect.
|
| > Sid: Well I'm going down to visit my sister in Virginia
| next Wednesday, for a week, so I can't park it.
|
| > Jerry: This Wednesday?
|
| > Sid: No, next Wednesday, week after this Wednesday.
|
| > Jerry: But the Wednesday two days from now is the next
| Wednesday.
|
| > Sid: If I meant this Wednesday, I would have said this
| Wednesday. It's the week after this Wednesday.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I've taken to saying "Wednesday" or "this Wednesday" to
| refer to whichever Wednesday is coming up, and then "the
| Wednesday after this Wednesday" to refer to the following
| Wednesday. It is a bit wordy but at least it's
| unambiguous.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Am I crazy or does the guidelines page not contain the
| guidelines? https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/
|
| Maybe because I'm on mobile?
| caseyohara wrote:
| The guidelines are hidden in the menu in the top-right on
| mobile.
| ketzo wrote:
| > the less nuanced the vocabulary, the less ways it could be
| interpreted
|
| I genuinely don't mean this in a dickish way -- isn't this,
| like, tautologically untrue?
|
| By definition, more nuanced, more descriptive language
| describes a narrower, more precise view of reality than
| broader language otherwise would.
|
| When would plainer language allow _less_ room for
| interpretation?
|
| I do generally think writing laws and other documents in
| plainer language would be beneficial for society, but not for
| this reason. Sometimes you do have to describe a really,
| really precise concept. "Kill" is different than "murder" is
| different than "manslaughter" in ways that are meaningful and
| important to preserve.
|
| Although even as I write that, I guess you could say "kill",
| "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without
| intention". That's kind of what you mean by word subroutines?
|
| At a certain point this just seems like a similarly-complex
| vocabulary, just with more words, though.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Yes, sorry, it's the latter idea that you arrived at: if a
| law cannot be understood by a 9th grader, then one might
| argue it is mal-specified. I grew up hearing stories of
| folks that dropped out in the 9th grade so it seemed like a
| reasonable cut-off
|
| I am 100% open to the fact that it may not be possible to
| do this, since nat-lang is its own special little thing,
| and trying to apply fixes to it may be nonsensical
| themselves
|
| The word subroutines would be cross-references to
| potentially more complex concepts akin to "one cannot end
| life (SS3.14.159) unless working (SS8.6.753) in a job
| (SS127.0.1) that allows State violence" where the
| boundaries of what this legislation cares about 'ending
| life,' the boundaries around 'working,' the boundaries of a
| 'job' would then be composed into 'citizen cannot kill
| other citizen'.
|
| I always got the impression that the nuance between murder
| and manslaughter wasn't in their degree of unlawfulness but
| rather in their sentencing, but I am deeply thankful that I
| haven't needed to know
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > I always got the impression that the nuance between
| murder and manslaughter wasn't in their degree of
| unlawfulness but rather in their sentencing, but I am
| deeply thankful that I haven't needed to know
|
| As an aside the difference between murder and
| manslaughter is in the intent of the perpetrator. Murder
| is typically when you intended for the outcome to be
| death (and is additionally divided into whether or not it
| was premeditated/planned).
|
| Manslaughter is reserved for when there was not intent to
| kill, but your actions caused a death.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Right, but that's why I said the sentencing part because
| to the best of my knowledge one doesn't become "more
| unlawful" in either case, rather if found guilty of the
| "lesser" of the two evils(?) you are unlikely to get
| capital punishment. The nuance is in the severity, not
| the crime
|
| Err, having written that out I now guess there is also
| some social component to it: you may still be received at
| a party if convicted of manslaughter but maybe not murder
| so we need different words to describe the act for
| purposes outside of the legal system
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I mean... they represent two very different acts, albeit
| with the same outcome. It makes sense that we use
| different words for it.
|
| We even draw the distinction between degrees of murder
| since sitting down and planning a murder in cold blood
| (murder in the first degree) is far different than a road
| rage incident with a gun (murder 2) which is different
| still than a shove in a bar where someone falls down and
| hits their head and dies (manslaughter). Hell, some
| places even distinguish between voluntary and involuntary
| manslaughter.
|
| The point is that all these words have meaning, and we
| deeply care about the nuance.
| btown wrote:
| Law does have subroutines like this... but they're
| implicit via "as used in this section, X is defined as"
| clauses that may be pages away or defined decades prior,
| as well as de facto definitions scattered through
| centuries of case law. New legislation can't simplify
| things unless the entire graph of implicit definitions is
| considered.
|
| All this was inscrutable before LLMs, but LLMs bring
| their own challenges: to summarize something in plain
| text, is it using a deep graph of definitions that are
| sourced and verifiable, or hallucinating their existence?
| IMO architectures as in
| https://arxiv.org/html/2410.04949v1 and
| https://arxiv.org/html/2409.13252v1 are useful; one uses
| LLMs to create local knowledge graphs and integrate them,
| then translates natural language queries into
| (successive) graph queries or graph-based RAG approaches.
| Things are still evolving in real time here, and IMO
| we've only scratched the surface of what's possible.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if a law cannot be understood by a 9th grader, then
| one might argue it is mal-specified_
|
| You want to administer nuclear weapons, the U.S. military
| and toxic-waste rules based on a high-school freshman's
| knowledge of the world?
| johnecheck wrote:
| Care to elaborate on the proposals to do laws via formal
| languages?
|
| Seems like there's a lot of pitfalls there, but that comes
| with the territory of writing laws in general.
|
| Seems like a concept worth exploring.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think you'd just end up going through the motions of this
| again: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0
| bluepizza wrote:
| It reminds me of the pre-symbolic mathematical notations where
| equations would be described in long paragraphs.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| I don't think so. Based on the article, the definition of
| legalese is a high prevalence of center-embedding. Center
| embedding is one of the most ambiguous ways to write sentences,
| so it does not make sense as a style of writing presisly.
| cryptoz wrote:
| That's not the definition of legalese and I protest the focus
| of the article and study: that center embedding is seemingly
| the sole issue.
| devjab wrote:
| In Denmark there is some part of legalese being the way it is
| because of what you talk about here. Legalese is essentially
| something you write for a "compiler". Unlike a compiler,
| however, the legal system isn't going to throw up and tell you
| that you are wrong when they interpret your legalese. Well I
| suppose it's a little like JavaScript where it'll continue and
| just replace bad parts with "any". Which is bad if you intended
| a part of a contract to mean something very specific.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| I expect there is a correlation between frequency of use and
| broadness of interpretation. Commonly used words may be more
| likely to mean multiple things. Words cul-de-sac'd in arcane
| contexts may be less likely to evolve in the popular sphere.
|
| When someone says: "That's so _random_ ", it isn't a commentary
| on determinism. There are many cases where adhering to a
| precise definition becomes problematic in popular discourse.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Possibly, but here's a data point in the opposite direction:
| Learning mathematics, especially higher forms of mathematics.
|
| Before students can learn directly from symbolic
| representations like formulae, mathematics teachers must
| communicate mathematical ideas to them using natural language
| -- and with just a few iterations of correcting
| misunderstandings, _this process somehow converges on the
| students having the same understanding of these abstract
| ideas._
|
| That is, natural language succeeds here in bootstrapping a more
| precise form of communication.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Mathematics can be unambiguously communicated because
| teachers are describing a system with only one or a few self
| consistent interpretations. Effectively, there's a natural
| error correction scheme built in (the state I've been
| described is invalid, so find the closest valid state and
| assume that). Note that even then, very many people struggle
| to communicate about math.
| godelski wrote:
| On a side note, I find this interesting how accepting everyone
| here is that language is ambiguous. The conversations seem to
| drastically change when you start talking about LLMs. But this
| is exactly why I don't see them replacing programmers even if
| they didn't write shit code. Because like with law, you don't
| really even know what you're trying to describe until you start
| doing it. And then you gotta keep updating it and be thinking
| really hard about all your edge cases.
|
| Though for law, I think some ambiguity is beneficial. We should
| be going after the intent of the law, not the letter. This
| isn't just about bad encoding, as in not well aligned with the
| intent, but that there's always exceptions. Having that human
| judge be there to determine if something is actually reasonable
| or not is beneficial, even if there's a strong bias to follow
| the letter.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| > Though for law, I think some ambiguity is beneficial.
|
| Ambiguity means that there are two or more possible
| interpretations and it's not clear which of them is intended.
| That's hardly useful. What's beneficial, and what you perhaps
| had in mind, is some amount of under-specification where the
| meaning is clear but leaves gaps to be filled in by judges.
| godelski wrote:
| Yes, this is what I mean. More focus on the intention. But
| I do also think we should give judges a lot of flexibility
| (technically they do). Because things are changing all the
| time.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| I agree with your second point about intentionality of the
| law. I would love to see strict requirements that new laws
| should have sections explaining: -the intention in writing
| the law. -societal and economic situation that lead to it
| being needed. -what measurable outcomes the law should
| achieve in x years
| im3w1l wrote:
| Politics is a game of making coalitions. People may be in
| favor of a law for disparate reasons. Take a law against
| prostitition. One person may be in favor of it to reduce
| trafficking. Another to reduce premarital sex. A third to
| reduce husbands' opportunities to cheat. A fourth to reduce
| the spread of std's.
|
| On the other side there may be one person that wants to
| have sex with prostitutes himself, another that believes
| women should be able to do what they want with their
| bodies, a third that believes prostitutes can be an
| important way for young men to gain sexual experience and
| skill, a fourth that thinks prostitution is bad but
| legalization to be a way of harm reduction.
|
| Not all of these people may be willing to admit their
| reasoning in writing. You could say that only following the
| written down reasoning is a feature. I haven't thought a
| lot about that subject, so I haven't made up my mind on it.
| godelski wrote:
| This seems like a feature and not a bug. Though in your
| example, it seems like those that would be required to
| state the reasoning wouldn't have a problem. A partial
| solution for the coalition issue is that signatories can
| be connected to the intentions.
|
| I want my politicians speaking more honestly. Or at least
| having to write things on the record. Things in the
| system that pressure more honesty, accountability, and
| transparency are better.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Not all of these people may be willing to admit their
| reasoning in writing
|
| They are not willing to admit it in _any_ domain, which
| is exactly why we _want_ it in writing.
|
| It's called accountability.
| Demonsult wrote:
| I was pulled into a tough legal case and my lawyer explained
| that engineers have the hardest time working with law because
| they expect things to be logical. It's really a squishy mess
| full of ambiguities that are resolved with sophistry and head
| games.
| tiahura wrote:
| The funny part is that engineers and doctors typically think
| they're the smartest one in the room. To prove this, they
| over think and over explain their deposition responses. All
| this does is give a skilled interlocutor more avenues to
| question and develop inconsistencies. At which point ego is
| triggered and they become super-defensive.
| quesera wrote:
| Ah, the always-entertaining moment when a person who is
| technically-correct (the best kind?) realizes that the
| socially-correct interpretation carries greater weight in
| the minds of everyone except themselves.
|
| Been there. Learned eventually. Sometimes still forget. :)
| Demonsult wrote:
| I won through a little bit of advice suggested by a
| layperson. I simply got the case moved to another room. The
| old judge hated us and the new judge loved us. All we had
| to do was decline magistrate jurisdiction. My lawyer was
| really reluctant for reasons I believe had to do with his
| standing with the court and not my case. And to think that
| layperson could be jailed for suggesting it.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| No, they wouldn't, nor is this some kind of secret trick
| as you seem to be implying. This is a fairly common
| practice sometimes called "judge shopping" similar to
| "forum shopping" (where you try to get your case moved to
| the jurisdiction most friendly to your claim). It's not
| illegal, though it is (in theory) discouraged. As an
| example, if you're not familiar, look up the Eastern
| District of Texas and patent litigation.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think they were going for ,,giving legal advice while
| not being a lawyer", not the suggestion of judge
| shopping.
| Demonsult wrote:
| Nobody directly involved ever mentioned the idea and we
| didn't change jurisdictions. We had the right to reject a
| magistrate simply because they were a magistrate judge
| and not simply a judge. Nobody discouraged it or even
| tried to fight it. If law was so logical and like code,
| this move would not cause an instant 180 in the case.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _to think that layperson could be jailed for suggesting
| it_
|
| Who told you forum shopping is illegal to talk about?
| echoangle wrote:
| Giving legal advice when not being a lawyer is illegal,
| it's probably very unlikely that this already counts as
| legal advice though.
| bombcar wrote:
| You were in the courtroom once, the lawyer will be in
| that room many, many times. He wants what is easiest for
| him, with some deference to you, but really mainly for
| him.
|
| All this stuff is hard to navigate if you're not used to
| it, or haven't been involved before.
| hooverd wrote:
| Thank god we don't have a jury of morons making medical or
| safety critical decisions.
|
| Edit: Actually we do. Skilled interlocutors like that doing
| their thing are how we got leaded gasoline.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _engineers have the hardest time working with law because
| they expect things to be logical_
|
| This sounds like something a lawyer would say to a client who
| wants to think that. Law and coding have remarkable
| parallels.
| internetter wrote:
| To some extent, but in my experience developers struggle to
| understand that ultimately, the law is interpreted by
| humans, instead of a strict rule based system. I understand
| this frustration, to be clear, but this distinction is
| obvious.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _in my experience developers struggle to understand
| that ultimately, the law is interpreted by humans,
| instead of a strict rule based system_
|
| True. But this isn't because someone is more logical.
| Honestly, that was a great line by a lawyer who probably
| wanted to focus on the case and not bill hours for a
| philosophy of law discussion.
| Demonsult wrote:
| The parallels are pretty superficial. The process is
| similar to theologians arguing scripture or maybe querying
| a low-grade LLM.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _parallels are pretty superficial_
|
| Not really. In particular, they're both professions
| filled with people who have egos the size of planets. I
| can just as easily see a surgeon telling a lawyer that
| the law is logical, being designed by man, in a way the
| human body is not just to get them to shut the hell up
| with broad questions about human anatomy during a
| surgical consult.
|
| (The actual parallel is they both deal with constructed
| languages. High-level languages are full of hacks and
| quirks and high-octane stupid it, just like the law.)
| IceHegel wrote:
| And very often means or in English - recent Supreme Court case
| about this.
| bluGill wrote:
| Precise and unambiguous is important, and so legal documents
| will always have features that make them wordy and complex.
| However according to the article the grammar of legal documents
| is often much more complex than needed, and you could get the
| same precise and unambiguous language with a much easier to
| read grammar.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Speaking as a non-lawyer who works in the legal industry, I
| question the idea that legalese is generally more precise and
| unambiguous. From what I've seen the purpose of a lot of
| these legal incantations is actually to be _more_ vague.
|
| This isn't _necessarily_ a bad thing. A more precisely worded
| contract, for example, is arguably more likely to have
| unambiguous loopholes that people can abuse without you being
| able to easily fight back. The well-known reductio ad
| absurdum of this phenomenon is Etherium smart contracts.
|
| You see this in laws, too. The US's Federal Rules of Civil
| Procedure and associated case law, for example, contain all
| sorts of explicit refusals to say things more precisely. The
| stated rationale, here, is that it's impossible for the
| people drafting these rules to anticipate every possible
| situation and contingency, and instead they must trust that
| reasonable attorneys and judges are able sort things out in
| the course of litigation.
| taeric wrote:
| Not just as a programming language. One that is being executed
| by adversarial agents. They won't just dumbly interpret the
| rules. They will do so with specific intent for gain. (I don't
| say this as a judgement.)
| aragonite wrote:
| It's true that trying to state complicated necessary and
| sufficient conditions will inevitably involve a ton of
| essential complexity due to the nature of the subject matter,
| but there may still be room for improvement by eliminating
| additional accidental complexity introduced by e.g. cumbersome
| syntax. I think by "legalese" the authors probably have in mind
| only the accidental complexity introduced by the distinctive,
| convoluted syntax of legal language.
|
| For instance, here [1] is a random paragraph I found in a
| contract that I think is pretty good example of "legalese", and
| here [2] is my attempt to rewrite it for readability. All the
| essential complexity remains, but I think (hope!) much of the
| accidental complexity has been removed. :)
|
| [1] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. Each person in whose name any book
| entry position or certificate for shares of Common Stock is
| issued shall for all purposes be deemed to have become the
| holder of record of such shares on the date on which the
| Warrant, or book entry position representing such Warrant, was
| surrendered and payment of the Warrant Price was made,
| irrespective of the date of delivery of such certificate,
| except that, if the date of such surrender and payment is a
| date when the stock transfer books of the Company or book entry
| system of the Warrant Agent are closed, such person shall be
| deemed to have become the holder of such shares at the close of
| business on the next succeeding date on which the stock
| transfer books or book entry system are open.
|
| [2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for
| ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book
| entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer
| books and the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the
| Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes,
| the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If
| no, the record date is the close of business on the next day
| when the books and systems are open.
| torstenvl wrote:
| What's a "record date"? How is it significant? What other
| provisions use that term?
| aragonite wrote:
| It's when a company takes a static snapshot of who
| officially owns shares which is then used to determine
| who's eligible for things like dividends or voting on
| company decisions. You'll often see it in dividend
| declarations (e.g. "shareholders of record as of March 1st
| will receive ...." Then if you want that dividend, you need
| to be officially listed as a shareholder by March 1st.)
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes but that definition is not in the rule you rewrote -
| so you need to add to what you wrote.
|
| I suspect you will end up with something similar to the
| original.
| Arelius wrote:
| One problem I see with your rewrite, is it's written in a
| style such that it appears to be a responsibility of a party
| of the contract, but failes to specify which party. Where the
| original reads as a statement of state and fact.
| NordSteve wrote:
| In the original, if either the stock transfer books of the
| Company _or_ the book entry system of the warrant agent are
| closed, the person becomes a holder on the next date when
| either are open.
|
| In your rewrite, if both the stock transfer books and the
| book entry system of the warrant agent are closed, the person
| becomes a holder on the next day when both are open.
|
| If you search for the language of the original, you'll find a
| bunch of examples of the exact same language. I'm with the
| others that this is well-litigated language that no one wants
| to change. https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=161&q=Each+person
| +in+whose+....
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I'd say it's more like a combination of trying to use natural
| language as a programming language in combination with
| behaviors that are analogous to indiscriminately using object-
| oriented idioms and enterprise design patterns (or overusing
| monads, for that matter) even when a much simpler way to
| express the same concept will do.
|
| Incidentally, I think that the reasons why programmers tend to
| do that are quite similar to the reasons for using legalese
| that the paper identifies.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Tangential, is there studies on rewriting legal laws in some
| language with formal verification? I see how it can be used to
| assert correctness and consistence.
| awinter-py wrote:
| unwillingness to use parens
|
| scheme is the true legalese
| alekratz wrote:
| I always thought it was because it needed to be rigid and
| specific.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I find nothing particularly incomprehensible about laws in
| general. In an experiment where you ask a bunch of amateurs to
| write legal documents I'm not sure you can apply any real
| interpretation to those results.
|
| They use the example of DUI laws. Here's two. There's nothing
| particularly complicated about them, and the "center embedding,"
| to the extent it is present, is entirely comprehensible.
|
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
|
| https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/169a.20
|
| Particularly clear both to the layman and to officers of the
| court.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's not a good example of legalese.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's one of the examples presented in their article, I did
| not pick it at random. Perhaps when people without subject
| matter experience write laws or contracts they end up as the
| paper suggests, but when people understand the problem domain
| clearly, the laws end up on paper with equal clarity.
|
| The paper notices the fact but draws the completely wrong
| conclusions.
| graemep wrote:
| I have looked up multiple British laws over a wide range of
| areas (from landlord and tenant to education to corporate) for
| practical purposes and it is mostly reasonably simply written
| given the need for precision and to cover edge cases.
|
| The article says "researchers plan to analyze British laws to
| see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction."
| Not in the last half century or so. I cannot recall having read
| any older legislation recently.
| ma2rten wrote:
| The study seemed not very convincing to me, at least the way it
| was described in the article. To summarize: they asked
| crowdworkers to write a law who used legalese, but not when
| writing news stories about it or when explaining the law. From
| that the researchers concluded that people use legalese to convey
| authority.
|
| But what if people just imitated the writing style of existing
| laws, but not with the intention to make it authoritative but
| because that is what they understood their task to be?
| District5524 wrote:
| I agree. Building on 200 Prolific answers and inventing names
| for their "own hypothesis" called "magic spell"? Odd. Lawyers
| have written like entire libraries on this subject, there are
| specialized journals examining the legal language used (e.g. in
| English: https://link.springer.com/journal/11196,
| https://www.languageandlaw.eu/jll, but there are probably
| separate journals for this in every language with 10M+
| speakers, like https://joginyelv.hu/) I understand this is not
| about the lawyers' approach to the problem, even if the author
| has a law degree, but a "cognitive sciences" department trying
| their hands on a problem that is new for them. But it would
| have been helpful if they had at least attempted to provide a
| reference to some prior art in the legal field...
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It keeps the legal industry in business, at least until GPT came
| along.
| CJefferson wrote:
| The soverign citizen movement loves GPT, they are using it to
| find all kinds of loopholes in laws, I'm sure exactly zero of
| them will stand up in court.
| mdaniel wrote:
| As a counterpoint, and _very slight_ argument for 'code is
| law', it seems at least nowadays that there isn't just one
| 'court' for it to stand up in. It depends a great deal on
| which specific judge one gets randomly (or district shops
| for). I am open to the rebuttal of "well that's what
| appellate courts are for" but chasing all these appeals is an
| expensive endeavor
| jandrese wrote:
| > I'm sure exactly zero of them will stand up in court.
|
| How is this any different than any other Sovereign Citizen
| legal argument?
| goatlover wrote:
| Is there any reason to think the legal industry has been
| automated and is no longer "in business"?
| keepamovin wrote:
| This was my favorite part: _Just as "magic spells" use special
| rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted
| language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they
| conclude._
|
| But also the idea of distance to create authority is interesting.
| In symbols through history, power lives behind the veil: in the
| veiled faces of monarchs, in the secrets, in their
| 'inaccessibility' to 'commoners'. As if these walls create
| something that would perhaps otherwise not exist? Interesting :)
| never_inline wrote:
| How is it much different from RFCs?
| efitz wrote:
| I think that all kinds of jargon and style canons (like using
| latex for academic papers or the special unwritten rules for
| formatting movie scripts) are primarily an in-group/out-group
| mechanism.
|
| By communicating in the "expected" way, you are communicating
| that you are part of the in group.
|
| As a side note, writing for a broad audience is harder than
| writing stylistically. You have to not only understand all the
| concepts involved, but you have to be able to accurately convey
| those concepts in simple sentences without the use of jargon. I
| believe this is a rare skill.
|
| In academia, for the last few years there has been a push for
| Plain Language Summaries (PLS) as an accompaniment to traditional
| abstracts. This is a step in the right direction IMO, because
| many people don't even bother reading the paper, or give up
| quickly, if it's overly obtuse.
|
| Law could take a lesson from this.
| max_ wrote:
| This is my experience when studying material on cryptography.
|
| You need a cryptography library implementation for language X:
|
| - Crypto implementation for language X doesn't exist
|
| - You try to read papers defining the crypto scheme.And they
| use variables like K and phrases like "oh this is from the
| group G"
|
| - You spend weeks trying to understand what G and K are.
|
| - You finally implement the crypto algorithm in language X
|
| Academic cryptographers that write papers and no code:
|
| Only "academic cryptographers" have the right to implement
| crypto schemes.
|
| It's very frustrating working on cryptography schemes in
| obscure languages and their are no ready libraries.
|
| And reading original papers often feels like there is alot of
| proactive gate keeping.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Most of the time, obscure language can call out to C.
| Therefore you should almost certainly just use FFI and
| leverage a C implementation of whatever crypto algorithm you
| want to leverage.
| max_ wrote:
| Well, that's a possible solution.
|
| But often FFIs pollute the reason one chooses to use
| obscure languages.
| bluGill wrote:
| True, but encryption should generally be an exception to
| that rule. Not that C is good for writing encryption, but
| because there are so many weird issues with encryption
| which can result in an implementation that passes all the
| test to still be severally broken. At least the C version
| has had a lot of experts looking at it and preventing
| those issues.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| You shouldn't be rolling your own crypto primitives. You
| can completely implement the algorithm 100% 'correct'
| according to the research paper but introduce a side
| channel that could cause key extraction by an attacker.
| For instance, if it doesn't always take the exact same
| amount of time to process something, a timing attack can
| be used to figure out what the private key is.
|
| Always use the battle tested implementation.
|
| Power analysis, timing attacks, acoustic cryptanalysis,
| etc... there's many forms of side channel attacks that
| can be used to defeat a theoretically sound cryptosystem.
| SilasX wrote:
| Related: in tptacek's Cryptopals/Matasano security challenge,
| there are two kinds of problems:
|
| A) Implement this off-the-shelf cryptosystem based on the
| public documentation about it.
|
| B) Given this cryptosystem and these hints, find and exploit
| a vulnerability.
|
| Surprisingly, I found the type A problems harder -- because
| the documentation was always missing some critical knowledge
| you were just supposed to know.
| openrisk wrote:
| TeX/LaTex has revolutionized technical publishing, enabling the
| easy (and free) typesetting of very complex documents. Its
| strange to cast it as "jargon and style canon" and does not
| help the rest of your argument.
| spockz wrote:
| Yes it has. And documents created with it have a distinct
| recognisable look which is instantly recognisable to others
| that also use it. This goes to the in-group/out-group
| argument of the GP.
| ashton314 wrote:
| What look are you referring to? Computer Modern font? Most
| journals I work with (ACM related mostly) use something
| other than the default.
| openrisk wrote:
| Its the forbidding look of well typeset equations and
| tables, not to mention the amazing tikz package :-)
| ashton314 wrote:
| Aaaaahhhh!! This document has _hanging punctuation_!!
| They must be using the `microtype` package!
| openrisk wrote:
| I agree about the recognizable look and its subtle second-
| order effects, but using LaTex as the typical in-group/out-
| group example is problematic when its use is a precondition
| for achieving a workable outcome.
|
| Its like saying that carpenters are using their toolkit to
| merely signal professionalism.
|
| In fact the same ambiguity applies to in certain cases to
| the original post (see my other comment). If people are
| forced to use a certain communication technology / form by
| technical or legal reasons then this is not a good example
| of in-group/out-group. Such examples are much better served
| by discretionary choices.
| adelpozo wrote:
| And you are 100% right but I do not think the point is
| against LaTex. But I am willing to bet money that after
| seeing thousands of pdfs formatted for icml/cvpr/nips, a
| reviewer would have an unconscious bias towards a pdf printed
| from msword or markdown. That's just a group thing and not
| that unexpected.
| sampo wrote:
| > Have you, like, tried to write an academic paper without
| LaTeX?
|
| It's only the core hard sciences that use LaTeX. Mathematics,
| computer science, physics, part of statistics, part of
| economics, part of engineering. When you move away from this
| core to e.g. chemistry, biology, applied physics, then it's
| all MS Word.
| ashton314 wrote:
| > like using latex for academic papers
|
| Have you, like, tried to write an academic paper without LaTeX?
| It's only in the past few years that viable alternatives (Sile,
| Typst) have been available, and they all owe a lot of their
| design to LaTeX.
|
| LaTeX made quality typesetting readily available to non-
| typographers. It's the opposite of gatekeeping.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why it's so important to be able to
| explain your specific field in simple language.
|
| Not only does it mean you understand your field, but it also
| means that you have developed your personality to look at
| things from an outsider's perspective.
|
| You have matured to be empathetic.
|
| This is also why having kids is a major step in being mature.
| You _have_ to explain things from their perspective.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I disagree. If I'm reading a guide on how to set up say on
| on-prem enterprise password manager, I don't want it to
| explain what "files", "network paths", and "LDAP" is. If you
| can't understand the document, it means you are missing
| prerequisite knowledge and it's not everyone's job to get you
| up to speed on that. Assumptions have to be made for
| documentation to be usable for its intended audience.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Where did I say technical documentation should explain what
| "files" are?
|
| I think you misunderstood my point completely lol.
| mvkel wrote:
| Laws are not written incomprehensibly at all. They use terms of
| art wherever possible, to reduce the need for interpretability in
| the future.
|
| For example, "best efforts" and "reasonable efforts" have
| specific legal and can't be used interchangeably.
|
| When companies create "plain English" versions of their tos,
| they're introducing a bunch of unnecessary exposure without
| realizing it
| sosuke wrote:
| It's awesome they try to define those terms. But I wouldn't
| call that well defined at all.
| https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6a4c20dc-594d...
|
| I would say that math is unambiguous.
|
| Measurements are becoming more unambiguous. The accepted
| measurement of a kilogram equalling s Avogadro's constant.
| Something like the number of silicon atoms in a 93mm sphere?
|
| But the definitions of best and reasonable are only accepted
| based off precedent and we've seen in recent history precedent
| in law isn't as reliable or defined as we may have thought.
|
| Is there any language or any level of language that can remain
| defined across time and culture?
|
| So long as legalese requires interpretation to determine intent
| and outcome it can be expected be incomprehensible.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Tax contracts by character length.
|
| The longer and more complex the contract, the greater the burden
| of enforcement by the state. Since long and impenetrable
| contracts impose a cost on the court system, they should be
| taxed.
|
| If no "contract registration tax" is paid at the time the
| contract is signed, the contract should be considered null and
| void.
|
| Contracts could still be kept secret under this scheme. Register
| the SHA256 hash of the contract, alongside its length in
| characters, in a government database.
|
| One welcome effect of such a tax: You'd eliminate, or greatly
| abbreviate, those long EULAs whenever you sign up for an online
| service.
|
| I don't think legalese is actually useful, I think it's just a
| bad habit.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I love this! The rationale too.
|
| I wonder if people would try to get around length limits by
| referring to other, existing contracts or clauses. Would we
| wind up with npm, but for contracts?
|
| We'd want to have certain well-chosen "primitives" defined, at
| least. What a "person" is, etc.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Yep, sounds great. How about a EULA that just consists of a
| few icons representing standard legal statements about what
| the corp will do with my data?
| whatshisface wrote:
| The most expensive court cases aren't over clearly written
| contracts that have a clause for the dispute, they're over
| ambiguous ones. Contracts are written to minimize costs
| already, and that's why they're long. Legal cases are often
| much more expensive for the parties than they are for the US
| (you could have a dozen lawyers on each side plus staff, and
| one judge). The existing incentives favor minimizing the amount
| of time spend in a courtroom.
|
| A sign that this is working is that breach of contract doesn't
| show up in the supreme court very often. The big legal battles
| involving major corporations are usually regulatory, copyright
| or patent disputes wherein the parties were opposed even before
| the thing the case is about happened.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >Contracts are written to minimize costs already, and that's
| why they're long.
|
| See OP. There seems to be this thing called "legalese" that
| makes contracts harder to understand than necessary.
|
| In any case, if litigation risk is a major cost of a
| contract, then people drafting contracts will incorporate
| that factor alongside character length.
|
| Overall, I think you may have a point. So my updated take is:
| Make the per-character tax low enough that it's not a factor
| for B2B contracts where it's standard for lawyers on both
| sides to review. However, make it high enough so that it's a
| factor in rental contracts, employment contracts, and EULAs,
| where at least one party typically doesn't retain a lawyer.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Legalese is a cost-reduction technique founded on the
| principle of making your potential future case look as much
| like a previous case, even word for word, as possible.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Hm, interesting thesis. You should post that as a
| toplevel comment.
| bluGill wrote:
| Legalese features complex grammar, anyone with good
| English skills and a lot of time could rewrite most laws
| so they are much easier to understand without losing all
| the cost reduction legalese provides.
| decatur wrote:
| Surely, your claim would only apply to contracts or court
| decisions, but not to laws.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Isn't this common in other countries, where a "notary" has to
| sign contracts as well?
| BartjeD wrote:
| In most Western legal traditions the notary is used or
| required in a small subset of transactions. For example real
| estate.
|
| Normal commercial purchase contracts don't need the added
| insurance that offers. And no one wants to pay for it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Every medium sized and larger company I know of has several
| notaries on staff who will put their stamp on anything you
| place in front of them. Typically company policy says you
| can bring your personal contracts to that person during
| work hours to have them notarized at no cost. I would
| assume normal commercial purchase contracts are notarized
| just because it is so easy to get someone to do it. (I've
| never been in this process so I wouldn't know, but that
| would be my guess)
| sib wrote:
| >> I would assume normal commercial purchase contracts
| are notarized just because it is so easy to get someone
| to do it. (I've never been in this process so I wouldn't
| know, but that would be my guess)
|
| Having been involved in the negotiation and signing of
| many, many commercial purchase contracts (primarily in
| the US), I have _never_ seen one be notarized. This
| includes at three giant publicly-traded companies and at
| three venture-funded startups.
| bluGill wrote:
| Are you sure - that person could just quietly put their
| stamp on it without saying anything. As the other poster
| said, in the US notaries will put their stamp on
| anything. In other countries they have different rules,
| so if you don't live in the US I could believe they don't
| stamp most contracts.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| In America, a notary stamps anything put in front of
| them. In other countries, they have a larger role. My
| limited understanding is foreign notaries represent the
| state in the contract. They want to make sure the
| contract is legal, clear, enforceable, etc.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is false, you don't need a notary to do real estate
| transactions in most of the West.
|
| Also it's sort of moot, the notary effectively just puts a
| stamp on it. If I write up a quit claim deed, there exists
| no mechanism to prove my ownership of that anyways
| BartjeD wrote:
| It's not false, it's an example of Italy and the
| Netherlands, and there are many more.
|
| The exception I dare say are the UK and US.
|
| The legal tradition in the west largely stems from the
| Roman Iius civile. Even the so called common law. And
| there too we see a role for civil officers to
| authenticate real estate transactions.
|
| So... your statement is false
| andrewhillman wrote:
| I was reading old law school book last year and it literally said
| it's written the way it is because lawyers were being paid by the
| word way back when.
| mdaniel wrote:
| it seems you have submitted twice:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42438850
| andrewhillman wrote:
| I was reading an old history of law book last year and the reason
| was that lawyers got paid by the word back in the day. Then they
| were paid by the sentence, paragraph and page.
| tonymet wrote:
| Ironic that a cryptic study says what we already knew
| calf wrote:
| Why did they only have the 2 hypotheses, the "copy paste" and the
| "magic spell"? I would think a 3rd hypothesis is that a legal
| document is trying combine two incompatible cognitive modes,
| natural language and logical rigor, so arising this convoluted
| spaghetti style. Their experiment would not test for this
| possibility, since storytelling is inherently unrigorous.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Gratifying to see this, I really hope it goes somewhere. Legalese
| is plain bad writing, needlessly so, and a steady drain on
| society.
|
| Interestingly there's a similar thing in police-speak, where
| things like "they were driving fast" become "the individual in
| question was traveling at a high rate of speed." Sort of casts a
| "magic spell" of seriousness and authority.
| openrisk wrote:
| At least some (sections of) legal documents are incomprehensible
| because they refuse (probably for legal reasons mind you :-) to
| use mathematical notation. In a sense the need to keep them
| accessible to a generally but not mathematically literate
| audience is precisely what turns them incomprehensible.
| Describing logical and mathematical relations in words is taxing
| the reader, thats why these notations where invented!
|
| A related but different issue applies to any form of supporting
| visual explanation, despite the lack of a cognitivive barrier
| (nb: assuming accessibility). The word must be the beginning and
| the end, otherwise it opens the door for disputes.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I'm not sure any one factor "explains" why something is written
| in a particular way. History, practical concerns, conveying the
| tone and register, signaling, and official requirements all play
| a part.
|
| Still, it wouldn't shock me if legal language is an unusual in
| how much of its incomprehensibility is explained by the "magic
| spell" hypothesis.
|
| Looking at the full text of the article, much of the analysis
| involves center embedding, which makes me wonder whether other
| features that contribute to complexity work the same way.
|
| Full text: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-
| Martinez-6/publica...
| XorNot wrote:
| This seems like an atrociously underpowered study.
|
| The issue of non-lawyers just cargo culting the legalese style
| aside, did they try to actually interrogate whether the plain
| text descriptions held up to adversarial interpretation?
|
| Like take the plain text, hand it to a lawyer with a test case
| description and let them shoot holes in it.
| miffy900 wrote:
| I think their study is flawed as it ignores what I think is the
| biggest reason: and that's the courts, or specifically judges.
|
| There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and
| criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings
| have influenced what is the acceptable wording to enforce
| whatever it is legislators intended for a particular law. When
| judges render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that
| itself is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity,
| over time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more
| exact wording.
|
| This is reflected in the tendency for judges to fall in groups
| that favour one way of interpretation over another, like
| Intentionalism, Purposivism, Textualism etc. The fact that
| statutory construction is something that is almost exclusively
| driven by judges themselves seems also pretty important when
| studying the language of the law and it's kind of absurd they
| ignore it in this study.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and
| criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings
| have influenced what is the acceptable wording ... When judges
| render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that itself
| is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity, over
| time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more
| exact wording.
|
| Anglosphere applies Common Law but that is not the case across
| the rest of the world. It is very much a 'style' expectation
| irrespective of an attempt to precision (which it often lacks).
|
| I would even argue that Common law countries follow simpler
| legal language because of an inherent pragmatism when compared
| with Civil Law.
|
| If we look at the legal output from countries that directly or
| indirectly are influenced by old 'cathedra' university
| heritages (old French, Italian legacy or influence) it is far
| more convoluted IMO.
| missing-acumen wrote:
| I often think that people saying others make things purposefully
| obscure to gain/retain legitimacy fail to recognize that any long
| standing field, be it in science or humanities, is inherently
| complex, due to its long evolved jargon and set of norms.
|
| Still, I am aware of cases where complexity has been used as a
| mean of power. Some languages have for instance baked in
| orthographic nuances and difficult grammar rules doing just that.
|
| It would be interesting to measure the extent to which we can cut
| some of the complexity we find in such examples. I suspect not
| much, both for reasons of culture and power.
| stratocumulus0 wrote:
| I've identified a specific style of speech in my native language
| that is used by less educated people trying to sound formal. It
| involves as many official or legalese-sounding terms a layman
| could come across, intertwined with "formal" grammatical
| constructs, many of which are incorrect, but which managed to
| spread virally. It's the kind of tone that you will find in a
| private message sent by a stranger who got angry with you on
| social media and tries to intimidate you with vague legal steps
| or something that you find in a complaint to customer service.
| Similar stuff going on with religion - the religious texts are
| all translated to sound vaguely archaic, but still comprehensible
| (the most common Bible translation here dates to the 1960s). This
| gives a feel that there's something serious going on.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| God, I'm terrified of giving off exactly these vibes when
| trying to write a formal email in a language that I'm not very
| fluent in.
| BartjeD wrote:
| The real story is that amateurs mimic legal form language to
| borrow its authority.
|
| The reality is mixed. Many legal terms have fixed meanings. But
| many expressions don't, and could be simplified.
|
| Students learn to write that way because their source material is
| like that. And because they want to appear knowledgeable.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Many people here are claiming that it has to try to do with being
| unambiguously expressive, but many laws are excessively verbose,
| largely incomprehensible, and _still_ extremely ambiguous, most
| often in sections that constrain the scope of a law. By contrast
| some of the most fundamental laws in the nation, the Constitution
| 's Bill of Rights, are generally just a sentence or two - and
| that works just fine.
|
| In my ever cynical opinion it's largely just a means of
| accumulating power without accountability. For instance in the
| terms and conditions of basically all major software now a days
| it says little more than "You forfeit all rights, we reserve any
| and all rights imaginable, and we can change this whenever want."
| But if it actually said this then people might be inclined to say
| 'hey that's not cool.' But when it's instead wrapped in page
| after page of incomprehensible legalese, people don't even bother
| trying to see what they're agreeing to.
| afiori wrote:
| I think that it is more about working around limitations, a TOS
| saying "I can do whatever I want, you cannot" might not hold on
| the basis of being too general, so you list all the areas where
| you can do whatever you want.
|
| Also if by law the user has some rights sometimes you might
| want to be careful to avoid contradicting them.
|
| Overall the cost of adding another paragraph is fixed and
| negligible and the possible gain in loss prevention is
| considerable
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation,
| the Constitution 's Bill of Rights, are generally just a
| sentence or two - and that works just fine._
|
| I don't think that's an accurate representation of the
| Constitution. I'd that we've seen clear examples of when the
| plain language of even the first two amendments has _not_
| worked just fine, and resulted in harm and litigation all the
| way to the Supreme Court.
| ffk wrote:
| Since the 90s, New Zealand laws have been written in clear,
| modern, accessible English. The end result is the broader
| population understands it more and can also reason about it
| while it's up for debate before being passed.
|
| I think the ambiguity in the first two amendments has to do
| more with the specific text rather than plain English itself
| being deficient.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Indeed. Some legalese is intentionally ambiguous, and
| sometimes that's good and sometimes that's no so good.
| mjburgess wrote:
| There's a difference between regulations, laws and
| constitutional principles -- which in my view, shouldn't really
| be regarded as laws at all.
|
| At highest fidelity, and least ambiguity, is a regulation since
| it applies to a highly specific context, and seeks to regulate
| relatively easy to name and describe practices. The audience
| for a regulation is typically a _regulator_ , ie., a part of
| the government. Regulations quantity over a finite number of
| institutions/bodies/practices which are generally identifiable
| explicitly at the time, even if the law is written more
| broadly.
|
| Many socially inadept engineering types assume either all law
| should be like regulation, but this would be tyranny, since you
| cannot easily enumerate or describe the vast majority of
| scenarios "of legal concern", and the attempt reduces social
| interaction down to the worst sort of prescribed interactions.
|
| The audience for ordinary laws is _judges_ (and somewhat, the
| police) -- to guide their decision-making when interpreting an
| unenumerable social scenario "of legal concern". These
| nevertheless concern scenarios with describable features, and
| its generally clear at least when they apply. These "general
| laws" quantify over an infinite number of possible "similar
| scenarios" whose similarity is giving by legal precedent and
| developed traditions of intepretation.
|
| Finally constitutional principles, in being "one sentence" are
| nothing really like laws at all. In my view their audience is a
| very strange sort of judge who is much closer to a moral
| philosopher. These principles are so radically underspecified
| that they can apply to almost any scenario relative to some
| philosophical framework.
|
| The purpose of constitutional principles is to limit the
| government under very broad ethical guidelines. So the audience
| there is the government, broadly. They exist to deter
| excessively immoral government action.
|
| As you can see each of these has radically different purposes
| and audiences, and none make any sense as anything like a
| programming language -- nor are they anything like each other.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| > By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation,
| the Constitution's Bill of Rights, are generally just a
| sentence or two - and that works just fine.
|
| To be fair, the Bill of Rights only works because it's been
| endlessly litigated, developing a large body of specific
| interpretaions. Together, all these interpretations would take
| far, far more than a couple of sentences to write out.
|
| However, any issue of contention will be endlessly litigated
| regardless of how specific the written law is.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| And to that extent, the Bill of Rights only works because the
| government finds it generally does not apply. For example,
| practically none of it applies to students at this point.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| The Bill of Rights works because of the genius of the
| people who wrote it at the time.
|
| It starts to _not_ work because of the lust for power of
| the people in charge of our bloated government now.
|
| This is a minority opinion on HN, but it's the correct one.
| snapcaster wrote:
| What are you using as a definition of "working"? Not
| asking as a bullshit fake question, your comment made me
| think about how one would even define that
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I was just copying the phrase of the parent commenters.
|
| I like to speak freely. I like knowing I can defend my
| home. I like remaining silent when questioned by
| authorities.
|
| So if I can do those things- it's working. If I can't do
| those things, it's not working.
| runako wrote:
| > the Bill of Rights only works because it's been endlessly
| litigated, developing a large body of specific
| interpretaions.
|
| As a follow-on to that, it is still being litigated and the
| interpretations continue to shift over time.
|
| For example, it wasn't until relatively recently that the
| Court began reading the Second Amendment in such a way as to
| limit the ability of jurisdictions to enact laws that prevent
| people from carrying firearms most places. Similarly, there
| is a current push to change the interpretation of the
| Fourteenth Amendment as well.
|
| Your central point is key: The Law is more about the
| judiciary's current understanding of what's written than what
| is actually written.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| The article backs up the common sense that laws are written in
| order to accumulate as much power for the State as possible.
|
| "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are:
| I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
| pnut wrote:
| That's some lame brained Reagan BS. I can think of other
| terrifying words like
|
| "Your child's multimillion dollar hospital bill for
| livesaving procedures isn't covered and you must pay"
|
| "Police arrested you and provided no evidence, we're going to
| imprison you without due process"
|
| "Neighbour broke into your house while you were grocery
| shopping, changed the locks and now claims to own the
| property"
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| You've obviously never had the government show up at your
| door saying these words.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| I've had lots of very helpful interactions with
| government employees throughout my life. As a matter of
| fact, there have clearly been many more unambiguously
| positive experiences than negative ones. Of course, we
| are both just playing the anecdote game here, but why
| should that stop anyone from asserting opinion as fact?
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I have also had "helpful interactions" with the
| government.
|
| However, I have also had people from the government show
| up at my door, unannounced, and these were indeed some of
| the most terrifying experiences of my life.
|
| Talk to other victims of state violence under communism,
| fascism, imperialism or even modern western democracies
| and it's quite obvious that this fear is justified.
|
| One way to frame it: "government showing up at your door"
| has murdered millions (billions?) of people. This is a
| historical fact. Not opinion. Not anecdote.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| You make a lot of qualifications to your original
| statement in this follow up! You'd be a lot more
| successful getting your point across if you wrote clearly
| to begin with, instead of starting with obviously untrue
| hyperbole. Another way to frame it is that "government
| showing up at your door" very frequently doesn't end up
| with billions dead.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| What qualifications?
|
| "Government showing up at your door" has killed at least
| millions of people. When it shows up at your door, you
| should be afraid because of this historical fact.
|
| Are you denying governments have killed millions of
| people?
|
| > Another way to frame it is that "government showing up
| at your door" very frequently doesn't end up with
| billions dead.
|
| It will very frequently turn out to be very bad news for
| you and/or your family if the government shows up at your
| door, especially if unannounced, especially if they need
| to tell you they're here to help. A firefighter will
| never have to explain to you "I'm here to help"
| toast0 wrote:
| > "Your child's multimillion dollar hospital bill for
| livesaving procedures isn't covered and you must pay"
|
| This one isn't really that terrifying for a few reasons.
|
| The bill is usually not available until the procedure is
| done, so your kid is ok.
|
| Either you can pay a $X million bill and it's not a huge
| deal, or much more likely, there's no way you can pay it,
| so it's more of a joke than a bill.
|
| Much more terrifying would be, we can fix your kid, but
| you'll need to pay $50,000 before we start. There's a lot
| of people who can come up with $50k, but it will be a major
| hardship, and it'll be really tough to get it quickly.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation,
| the Constitution 's Bill of Rights, are generally just a
| sentence or two - and that works just fine._
|
| No, that hasn't worked fine _at all_.
|
| Do you realize the amount of judicial interpretation and flip-
| flopping that has gone on over just the first two amendments?
|
| They're like the poster children for being under-specified.
| runako wrote:
| I would say they are specified well, but the ramifications of
| those specifications are not politically palatable much of
| the time.
|
| As a current event, look at the push to reinterpret the
| Fourteenth Amendment provision on birthright citizenship.
| That provision is written quite clearly, but people do not
| like what it says and as a result we may as a country go
| through a period where we ignore it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, they are not specified well. They are not specified
| well because they come into conflict with other rights, and
| it is not spelled out which rights take precedence in which
| circumstances.
|
| Nor does it have anything to do with "palatability". When
| the Bill of Rights was passed, they were _never_ understood
| to be absolute. The first amendment was never understood to
| make defamation allowed, nor was the second meant to
| prohibit towns from preventing people from carrying their
| guns into taverns. All of this is extremely clear from
| commentary and practice at the time.
|
| Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous, as it is
| hard to imagine it in conflict with other rights. This is
| not the case, however, for many other rights.
| runako wrote:
| > Nor does it have anything to do with "palatability"
|
| Conflicts with other rights is a really good point that I
| missed.
|
| > Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous
|
| And yet it is currently a topic of debate. It's entirely
| possible it gets tossed in the coming years, at least
| until fashion changes again.
| crazygringo wrote:
| >> _Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous_
|
| > _And yet it is currently a topic of debate._
|
| Its constitutionality and meaning are not under debate.
| It is quite clear.
|
| There's a debate about repealing it, which would require
| a new amendment.
|
| But there's no serious debate about the existing
| amendment's _interpretation_.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| There is a debate on the meaning, but one that has not
| yet made it's way to the Supreme Court who will
| ultimately decide.
|
| The nuance that you run into is that legal opinion
| defining what 'subject to the jurisdiction of the US'
| means (from the 14th amendment) was made in 1898, but at
| that time the border was relatively open.
|
| Immigration restrictions started amping up exponentially
| in the 20th century, especially amidst the world wars. It
| seems unlikely that the court would have ruled as it did
| in the context of these new laws.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| There's a simpler explanation. Legislative drafting is a low-
| status legal job in the USA. In the K, traditionally only the
| best new law graduates are considered for legislative drafting,
| official rulemaking and so on. In the US, politics is a
| destination for lawyers who can't qualify for prestigious
| corporate or judicial appointments.
|
| Legislative language doesn't have to be this way, but Americans
| are weirdly impressed by prolixity, and love writing phrases like
| 'in order to' instead of just 'to', or 'at this time' instead of
| 'now.'
|
| Also the American legal code is horrendously overgrown (not
| comparing it to other countries here, just on its own terms).
| Plato warned that when laws are so many and complex as to be
| incomprehensible to the average person, tyrants would exploit the
| resulting disillusionment with law to the detriment of the
| public.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I convinced myself that it is a semi-conscious effort to justify
| their existence and fees.
|
| Everyone interacts with law at some point, it is unavoidable. And
| since legalese can be impenetrable, you just have to hire a
| lawyer. This bakes in their societal necessity and guarantees
| fees for lawyers if all kinds.
| tivert wrote:
| > In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers
| (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were
| recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write
| two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write
| laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson,
| and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to
| write stories about those crimes.
|
| > ...
|
| > "When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding
| regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from
| scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-
| embedding in either case," Martinez says.
|
| How can such a study explain "why" legal documents "are written
| in an incomprehensible style?" Seems to me it would _only_ tell
| you that legal documents conventionally have a particular style
| that even laymen are aware of an know how to mimic.
|
| If you wanted to get at the "why," I'd think you'd need to do
| historical analysis _and_ talk to and test lawyers instead of
| laymen.
| timonoko wrote:
| Problem with extended programming language called English is that
| it has no "modes", and you have to use weird words and exotic
| intonation to have desired effect. Particularly OJSimpson's
| lawyer comes to mind, comical even those of us who barely knoweth
| the language.
| DanielHB wrote:
| So like C++?
| dvh wrote:
| I once asked on free law advice website how do I find if certain
| paragraph of certain law is still in effect (i.e. was not
| overridden by newer law) and the lawyer just didn't understand
| what I want. I think he couldn't comprehend that someone would
| just want to point at a paragraph and asks "is this still a law?"
|
| As a programmer this seems like essential information to know,
| right? In code I can write "asdf" on the line and if it's still
| used it fails to compile or throws a runtime error but in law
| there is no such thing. And there is no incentive to simplify it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'm going to throw out the worst analogy I'll probably ever
| make:
|
| The law is written in higher-level languages, and the courts
| are the compilers. It's just that most written laws probably
| never go through the compilation stage, until it becomes a
| problem for someone.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Isn't that what law codification is?
|
| It assembles and organizes all the laws, removing anything that
| has been repealed.
|
| So if you're looking at a codified version, then you know it
| hasn't been repealed as of its publication.
|
| I don't know how often the codified versions get updated, and
| therefore how long of a lag there can be.
|
| Any lawyers here?
| showerst wrote:
| NAL but I have written legal database software, and helped to
| get a few bills passed. Codified laws are "full" printings
| that include new laws that were passed, and laws that were
| explicitly repealed.
|
| This is not the whole scope though: perhaps a court opinion
| invalidated some law but the legislature hasn't gotten around
| to removing it. Or perhaps some new interpretation keeps
| means a law's applicability has changed (this happens a lot
| with laws that are pre-internet).
|
| Sometimes there are old laws that were superseded but never
| repealed due to obviousness: Laws allowing redlining,
| penalties for witchcraft, that sort of thing. Though that's
| more likely at the local level than state.
|
| Just looking up the laws on the books is not _that_ helpful
| to knowing is a specific part applies to you.
|
| PS: Laws are generally codified yearly in the US, except the
| feds who do it a few times a year. States have 'session laws'
| that are a running collection. These are a pain to 'merge'
| into the laws, hence Lexis and West having big budgets and
| large work forces doing it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Codified laws generally list new laws that were passed,
| and laws that were explicitly repealed_
|
| Codes aren't just lists, not in any state I've been in. And
| annotated codes exist to expand on the case law.
| showerst wrote:
| Oops, I meant to say generally 'include', not list. I'll
| reword that.
| webstrand wrote:
| The worst part is, you have to have to actually violate the law
| to even get standing to ask the court "is this actually
| illegal".
| tpmoney wrote:
| The answer to this is that lawyers spend a lot of money paying
| for "codified" versions of the law, usually compiled by
| publishers like LexisNexis or Thompson-Reuters. And those
| companies in turn spend a lot of money on their own lawyers and
| developers to try to compile 51+ different formats of
| documenting and distributing law and law changes into a format
| that allows lawyers to not only know what the law is NOW but
| also often more pertinent, what the law WAS at the moment the
| issue in question occurred. From my time in that world:
|
| A) it's amazing anyone at all is confident about anything
|
| B) it's amazing how bad the states and feds are at getting this
| information out in any usable form
|
| C) it's amazing how complex the problem domain is and how many
| exceptions to exceptions to the rules there are
|
| D) if you might go to jail over it, you probably want to be
| paying a lawyer to look it over
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _he couldn 't comprehend that someone would just want to
| point at a paragraph and asks "is this still a law?"_
|
| What are you pointing at? If it's in the code, it's a law. If
| you're reading a random bill from who knows when, no, there
| isn't an easy answer, it would be like pulling a random git
| commit and asking what has been rewritten.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Bureaucracy + poetry = "bureauetry"
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| > "We thought it was plausible that what happens is you start
| with an initial draft that's simple, and then later you think of
| all these other conditions that you want to include. And the idea
| is that once you've started, it's much easier to center-embed
| that into the existing provision," says Martinez, who is now a
| fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.
|
| Seems to me that's also how code bases become obfuscated after
| starting out cleanly.
| veeter wrote:
| I always thought it was some kind of protectionist mechanism
| amongst the academic trades.
|
| Can't do your own taxes if you don't speak accounting, you have
| to pay somebody.
|
| Can't represent yourself in court if you can't even comprehend
| what's being said, either.
| n144q wrote:
| Probably not the best place for a programming joke, but here I
| am:
|
| This is exactly why I write code that nobody can understand.
| Can't get fired.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| That sounds plausible. You also see an abundance of center
| embedding in older philosophical works. In highschool I tried
| reading through these, and they way they write forces you to
| read slowly and constantly backtrack.
|
| I think you see it with more complex subject matter because you
| have more tangents shooting off. It means the writer needs to
| think ahead and do more mental work in order for the sentences
| to be read more easily. It was also more burdensome to edit
| your manuscript back then, so you had physical as well as
| mental friction.
| goatlover wrote:
| Or it takes expertise to do anything sophisticated in those
| fields. Representing yourself is not a good idea because you
| probably don't have the courtroom experience arguing cases, and
| likely don't have an in depth understanding of the law.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| In the future only advanced intelligence will understand the api
| governing human - computer - human - animal - human interactions.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| I always thought it was because of narcissism. I didn't see it as
| casting an authority spell over others.
| Finnucane wrote:
| See also: Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
| renewiltord wrote:
| I think laws are inherently hard to make comprehensible because
| of the edge-cases they have to capture. Try
| https://novehiclesinthepark.com/ to see if you can come up with
| something that agrees with everyone.
|
| However, the style that people use in laws is mostly historical.
| Almost all of these are copy-paste jobs because they are trying
| to not deviate from existing language - which has the big
| advantage that it has been interpreted to mean a certain thing.
| Though I have to wonder what portion of these are really that and
| what portion are people's belief about this being the case.
|
| If we were to do it over, legalese would incorporate more
| programming language learnings. Center-embedding is obviously
| wrong, and I have seen more contracts use forward declaration by
| first defining terms and then using them. I think it's good that
| this study points out things like these and maybe we can improve
| them over time.
| jordanpg wrote:
| This is the best statement of the problem. A lot of folks on
| this thread are importing the idea from computers or math that
| there is a _right answer_ to expressing laws in written
| language.
|
| But this point of view ignores the vast diversity of human
| experience and variability that has to be governed using a few
| words. It is not the case that every possible edge and corner
| case can be anticipated ahead of time, and this would, in any
| event defeat the purpose of trying to make the law more clear.
|
| Maybe laws can be written more clearly or more succinctly in
| some cases, but the specific words, phrases, grammar, etc.
| chosen matter quite a lot in a common law jurisdiction.
|
| "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing
| more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."
|
| -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law
| empath75 wrote:
| Sometimes contracts and laws are often written ambiguously not
| accidentally, but because it's too the benefit of someone
| involved in the negotiation that it'll have to be sorted out
| later in court. Lawyers of course will say that they would prefer
| all contracts be clear and legible, and yet they don't write them
| that way, and I refuse to believe that it's just bad luck that
| every contract ends up being difficult to read and ambiguous.
| Everyone involved went to a good school and took a lot of classes
| about writing. Good lawyers love ambiguousness because that's
| where they earn their money. Obviously there's some clauses that
| everyone involved thinks need to be crystal clear, but it's not
| accidental that contracts are written in such a way that they
| admit several interpretations.
|
| If you read Matt Levine, you see examples of this intentional
| ambiguity being exploited by finance lawyers pretty frequently.
|
| https://archive.ph/tQhqB is one example
|
| One way you can think about it is that ambiguity in contracts and
| laws is one more way that the powerful and wealthy can leverage
| that power against people who have less ability to hire good
| lawyers. A good lawyer will fight hard to make everyone they want
| clear and obvious, and everything they don't want vague and
| ambiguous, because they know they can abuse the legal system
| later to pick your pocket.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| An AI that understands legal text and can reliably answer
| questions about it will rake in billions.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| The problem is that the reliable answers are unsatisfactory due
| to the ambiguity inherent in law. i.e. a lot of "maybe" or "it
| depends" or "probably". Maybe the specific judge is kind of a
| hardass that you're dealing with that day. Maybe the specific
| cop that pulled you over has a tendency not to show up in court
| and so you're more likely to get a default judgement, but not
| 100% because the cop could still show up.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's definitely a difficult problem, but it doesn't have to
| be perfect to be valuable. Human lawyers aren't perfect
| either.
|
| Most legal issues people have are have clear answers, and the
| AI should be err on the side of admitting it doesn't have a
| certain answer.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous
| incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because
| "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will
| happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right.
|
| I also think lawyers don't find it worth optimising the language
| much, because the target audience is other lawyers who know all
| the incantations anyway. The target audience is lawyers instead
| of laypeople, because the language isn't what matters in the
| first place. What matters is all the relevant case law, which can
| vary so much from the "obvious" or even "right" interpretaion of
| the written language, that a layperson not using a lawyer for all
| but the most trivial legal needs is a recipe for disaster.
| gosub100 wrote:
| The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive
| their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher
| salary.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| I've thought a lot about how absurd it is that the rules we
| must follow are so obtuse that an entire profession exists to
| advise and argue if we and others are following the rules.
| But I've come to believe we just live in an absurd reality,
| and there's no possible way to communicate a set of rules to
| everyone, or even to get everyone to agree to one set of
| rules in the first place, so the legal profession is an
| unfortunate necessity. Of course, that doesn't preclude
| lawyers from sometimes being unscrupulous.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think of case law as like a git repo of every function
| and subroutine anyone ever wrote. So on one hand it makes
| sense to need a specialized education to use it (so we
| don't waste time arguing the same noob points over and
| over).
|
| But on the other hand, you shouldn't need a law degree and
| bar license to sue an insurance company to pay up. Their
| client hit you, you're injured, now pay up or have a judge
| order you to. But the lawmen have carved out their own moat
| that puts ordinary people in a position to rely on them.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT
| different from writing software. Laws are programs.
|
| In that context, does it really seem so absurd that the
| rules are "obtuse"? Many people feel that way when reading
| someone else's code, but that doesn't mean all the weird
| conditionals are unnecessary.
| echoangle wrote:
| The problem is that the output of the program determines
| if you're going to jail. There are laws that many people
| might break just because they have no clue that there's
| even a law about that.
|
| Realistically, you're probably not going to go to jail
| immediately but you can have a bad time if you're caught
| doing some things you didn't even know were illegal.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not
| THAT different from writing software.
|
| I've done software (a lot) and worked in a legislative
| office (a little), they are extremely different.
|
| > Laws are programs.
|
| Laws are _not_ programs, or even meaningfully analogous
| to anything so deterministic. They are more like, if we
| must make a computing analogy, components of prompt
| templates (other portions of which will be filled by
| evidence and...well, a bunch of other stuff you don't
| control when writing the laws) that will be used by an
| extremely high temperature LLM. Which you can't actually
| test freely against, though you can observe past behavior
| - but, even then, you are stymied by the fact that the
| LLM itself is constantly updated with retrained, and
| sometimes rearchitected, versions, without useful release
| notes.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| No, law is code.
|
| It's just that the programming language is mushy-- 400
| definitions of the word "set" is the example my AI
| offers-- and the interpreters vary. In a pinch, the code
| writers know that nearly anything they write can be
| rescued by the chief interpreter, which has led to a
| model of legislatures intentionally writing ambiguous
| code and top-level courts interpreting with an emphasis
| on public good.
|
| But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will
| normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy
| comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with
| remarkable precision and it becomes obvious again, law is
| code.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will
| normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy
| comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with
| remarkable precision
|
| If this were really true, there would be zero appellate
| cases (and probably not even trial cases, as the clear
| and only correct resolution would be apparent to all
| parties without a trial which would only add expense) in
| these areas, and yet... That's very much not the case.
|
| If law, even in these areas, is "code", it is so more in
| the sense of the Pirates Code in _Pirates of the
| Carribean_ , not computer software.
| no_wizard wrote:
| The sociological implications of code is often not
| explored enough.
|
| If you look at code as in, only syntax and its meaning
| for the language, I can see how folks might reason along
| the lines of 'law is similar enough to code. You are
| saying what can and can't be done'
|
| However, code is rarely only its syntax. Its meaning is
| contextual, often to the business of which it applies,
| and would have no real meaning outside of that context,
| and context may change at any given time, which means
| reinterpreting the code, replacing the code etc.
|
| That is what law in practice, is what code is in
| practice. Its syntax is very technical, but its meaning
| is entirely dependent upon its applied context.
|
| I been thinking alot about this lately, and understanding
| the sociological implications of code in an organization
| (or in more extreme cases, society) has really changed my
| point of view of how to build software
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Here is an example of a law that reads more like _code_ :
| 28 U.S. Code Chapter 37 - US Marshals Service[1]. Maybe
| an appellate court could be called on to interpret it
| once in a while, but really it's intended to provide
| clear, unambiguous step-by-step instructions to agents of
| government.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/part-
| II/chapter-3...
| coldtea wrote:
| There are literally 1.33 million lawyers in the US...
| fao_ wrote:
| "(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder
| they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their
| service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary"
|
| I know this might be difficult for those of us who have
| specialized in computer science and have found a lot of
| things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are
| difficult and complicated too! Not _everything_ is
| gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you
| 'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a
| person!
| gosub100 wrote:
| Computing has become substantially cheaper and more
| accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal
| industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more
| efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the
| 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the
| nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw
| and money to be made in the city, no?
| goatlover wrote:
| Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a
| medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to
| learn in medicine?
| gosub100 wrote:
| No, thats yet another cartel.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Couldn't have anything to do with it being one of the
| most complex regulatory environments in the nation, no?
|
| Computing became cheaper because it has layer upon layer
| of economies of scale.
|
| Law _doesn't_ because every case is unique and is
| literally decided upon minutiae and exceptional details.
|
| Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives
| on the world.
| robocat wrote:
| > Couldn't have anything to do with it being one of the
| most complex regulatory environments in the nation
|
| And smart software engineers never over-complicate their
| code, right?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Sure there's definitely some of that. That doesn't
| "explain why" (OP) code is complex nor does it prove
| there's a "cartel" (GP) trying to gatekeep software
| engineering.
| gosub100 wrote:
| "wild" is not defined as as "anyone who doesn't share
| your perspective".
| llamaimperative wrote:
| That's why I didn't use it that way. I used it to
| describe your belief that law and medicine are arcane
| primarily for the purpose of gatekeeping.
|
| "Wild" is the most generous word I could come up with,
| sorry!
|
| Is software engineering arcane for similar gatekeepy
| reasons or is that for more legitimate reasons?
| zo1 wrote:
| Except we go out of our way in programming to make
| everything as easy as possible. If you think about it, half
| the non-video and non-social media internet is just
| programming related, with guides, tutorials, and various
| tools to make it as easy as possible to get somebody doing
| something.
|
| And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply
| complicated and we need to use complicated tools,
| specifications, processes and other such things in order to
| describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer
| stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with
| complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on
| processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order
| to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing
| complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-
| driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in
| simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them,
| and they require actual human actors to drive the process
| forward from one step to the next.
|
| This is why they are so against automation and
| simplification of their field. They know that if they
| automate the processes, that their field becomes very
| focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just
| realize that most of what they know can be codified in some
| sort of unambiguous specification format.
| Zak wrote:
| The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face
| punishment. It is an injustice if most people can't figure
| out whether things they want to do are legal or not without
| employing a lawyer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The law is special because everyone has to obey it or
| face punishment.
|
| In theory, yes. In practice, not "everyone", and very
| much not equally true of everyone to whom the law
| practically applies at all, even in the places which tout
| "equal protection of the laws" as a bedrock principle.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's a lot like C++, come to think of it.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous
| incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because
| "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will
| happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right.
|
| If the American legal system is any indication, the vague, bad
| stuff is the desired outcome.
|
| It's amazing the regulations that the EU has where it says "no,
| do not do this", and not only do people generally not do it,
| the people who do get caught doing it are fined into oblivion
| for it. There's no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke
| holes in the law to get around something society clearly
| desired, because the court is going to do what society desired.
|
| Why, yes, I am talking about data privacy, but there are other
| examples.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the
| law to get around something society clearly desired, because
| the court is going to do what society desired_
|
| Wat. I've literally seen tax laws in Germany and Sweden which
| could only possibly apply to one family. European law is in
| sans serif; that doesn't mean it's less convoluted than
| American law.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US,
| but with every other law, too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US,
| but with every other law, too_
|
| You're seriously arguing that the EU bureaucracy is
| streamlined and comprehensible without lawyers? Why do
| you think every rich person and powerful firm in Europe
| has fleets of lawyers?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I'm arguing that when court cases in the US are judged,
| the letter of the law (and thus all of that arcane
| language) matters more than the spirit of the law, while
| it seems to be the opposite in the EU for a lot of
| things.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _when court cases in the US are judged, the letter of
| the law (and thus all of that arcane language) matters
| more than the spirit of the law, while it seems to be the
| opposite in the EU for a lot of things_
|
| Are we watching the same Supreme Court?
| int_19h wrote:
| In US, we have a constitutional protection against bills
| of attainder.
| coliveira wrote:
| That's not true at all. Law is written like it is because
| courts give a lot of importance to what is written and changes
| in these written forms have many possible consequences. This,
| combined with the fact that our judicial principles go very far
| back (starting already in ancient times with the Romans), makes
| it very inconvenient to change language and terms used.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| This is correct. If 50 cases interpret and define the word
| "includes" in a contract, and you decide to use the word
| "comprises," you may end up burning time and money in court
| and negotiations.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Do engineering specifications use the same center embedded
| sentences as legal documents?
|
| IETF defines may, must, shall, etc. in every document but
| doesn't use the same format as law.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Law and technical standards are two places where language
| must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And
| destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I have two different but reinforcing memories that
| support this.
|
| 1) I remember being in a Requirements Review meeting and
| spending an entire hour debating the meaning of a word.
| Don't remember the word, but it was something like
| "includes".
|
| 2) I separately remember being in a Requirements review
| for a feature that concluded successfully. Then later in
| a Design Review for that feature. And after that, Code
| and Unit Test reviews of the same feature. Then, months
| later, the feature was presented to the person who asked
| for it in the first place and then said, "that's not what
| I wanted. I wanted xxx instead."
|
| Yes, this person was at the Requirements and Design
| reviews!
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Agreed. My point is that engineering documents read
| differently than legal documents, but have the same
| necessity for precision.
| rbanffy wrote:
| This would be a good case for restricted versions of our
| commonly used languages with as few words and constructs as
| possible on a simple and consistent grammar. Much like a
| programming language for defining law.
| delfinom wrote:
| But then a contract would never be able to describe
| modern day inventions, processes or procedures as
| deliverables lol
| kevindamm wrote:
| You could, if you treated the object deliverable as a
| variable, with variables defined meta-circularly via a
| pre-representation.
|
| To do it, lawyers would have to learn some category
| theory, but I think many of them would enjoy it.
| psychlops wrote:
| Despite your opening sentence, you didn't disagree with OP.
| "Courts" are a venue for other lawyers.
| sdwr wrote:
| There's a constant tendency here to assume other people
| don't think, they blindly copy what's popular.
|
| Everybody learns partially through pattern recognition,
| partially from trial and error, partially from armchair
| reasoning. And functions mostly by repeating what they
| already know.
|
| But it's emotionally satisfying to put all the negative
| parts onto others (cargo cult sheeple reciting magic
| spells), and save all the positive identifiers for yourself
| (brave scientist uncovering truths about the universe)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay, but I don't see that happening here? Like, nobody
| is comparing my code to legalese. And if they did, I'd
| apologize profusely if normal people had to interact with
| my source code on a regular basis! I wouldn't try to
| defend writing it the same way I write it when a single
| digit number of people have to read it ever. And lots and
| lots of people have to read and follow laws.
| freejazz wrote:
| Laws are precise, unlike your posts here, which are
| obtuse.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Despite your opening sentence, you didn't disagree with
| OP.
|
| They certainly did.
|
| coliveira is saying a change in legal language opens up a
| contract to a reasonably different interpretation in the
| future. And we know it's reasonable (even likely) because
| there are myriad historical precedents where such
| ambiguities were used in the past to win cases against,
| say, GrantMoyer's Optimized Non-Standard Legal Language Law
| Offices. By using standard language that specific class of
| ambiguity issues goes away.
|
| On the other hand, any good faith definition of
| "superstitious" is a pejorative that holds the belief to be
| irrational. So when GrantMoyer's Optimized Non-Standard
| Legal Language Law Offices uses its patent-pending
| optimized, non-standard language in their contracts, they
| are throwing out all the superstitious terminology on the
| basis that _nothing bad will actually happen_ as a result
| of doing this. (At least, aside from things like random
| chance or any of the other true reasons that just happen
| coincide with superstitious falsehoods.) That 's a bad
| idea-- it isn't supported by historical precedent, and it
| is likelihood to cause _predictably_ bad outcomes in the
| future.
|
| The only mitigating factor is this weasel sentence:
|
| "Except sometimes the superstitions are right."
|
| But to be generous we must take that to mean only the
| truism that superstition sometimes coincides with things
| like random chance. (Otherwise it'd be like saying no one
| goes to a particular restaurant anymore because it's so
| crowded, which is funny but incoherent.)
|
| Edit: clarifications. Also, in closing, Your Honor, I call
| for one of those "bad court thingies." :)
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| When I worked at a law firm that specialized in corporate law
| (in IT), they had a dedicated team just to find ways to
| exploit errors with wording and commas in contracts.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Lawyers and hackers are very similar professions.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| I would tend to disagree with that, but if you're also an
| attorney with a cybersecurity background, I'd love to
| know why you think this.
| ursamin wrote:
| language lawyer: This is using a restricted (and much
| aligned) meaning of the word "hacker" and not the one
| codified by members of Hacker News.
| fragmede wrote:
| (maligned)
| Galacta7 wrote:
| See also theologians and philosophers (also good at
| finding loopholes in theories).
| LiquidSky wrote:
| New York attorney here. You're kind of getting it, though put
| in a silly way. It's not that "vague, bad stuff will happen"
| it's that, in common law jurisdictions at least, precedent
| controls. So if you use language that has been upheld for
| decades or even centuries you can be as confident as possible
| that whatever you're doing will also be upheld. Any novelty or
| variation introduces greater risk of a ruling against you. This
| naturally creates inertia and a conservative approach in legal
| practice.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Nah, it's all a gentlemen's agreement, given Roe vs Wade, if
| you want it enough you can bend it the way you want.
| dehrmann wrote:
| On which end of Roe? The reasoning for the decision was
| sketchy, and Dobbs overthrew decades of case law.
| wbl wrote:
| All of the original case, and Kennedy's sweet mystery
| opinion in Casey, and then the transparently political
| overturning emphasize how political courts can be.
|
| I read some of the argument transcripts and usually it is
| a bunch of lawyers trying to sort out what the law should
| be given it works this way in this case and that way in
| that case and this one goes up the middle or the circuits
| disagree. But sometimes it is much more nakedly
| political.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Yeah, people often think there's some magical value to
| words, but they only have value in the political
| environment they sit in. If you decide not to enforce it,
| it doesn't exist, if you decide to over enforce it,
| everyone will think about it.
|
| It's all people's decisions, there's no magic about it.
| cowl wrote:
| This doesn't explain the legalese in Civil case
| juridistictions which almost all of Europe is. There is no
| case that can change whether something is legal or not. My
| pet theory is legalese is just to sound different,
| authoretative and if we want to go into conspiracy theories,
| than it is to make sure that lay people will need you even
| for the simple cases.
| bombcar wrote:
| Part of it is that lawyers are paid.
|
| If you pay a repairman to come to your house and fix
| something, even if he does fix it in five seconds, you're
| going to feel a bit cheated because you paid him assuming
| it would take hours.
|
| Same with a lawyer - if you pay one to write something for
| you, or review a contract, they WILL write something or
| find something that makes you feel like you got your
| money's worth.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous
| incantations built up over millenia_
|
| Careful past that Chesterton fence
| dotancohen wrote:
| > What matters is all the relevant case law
|
| Not in all jurisdictions. And even in those places, the laws
| are often difficult to decipher.
|
| I think that the problem is trying to encode both intent and
| formal instructions in the same language. If a law were to
| state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off
| tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any
| ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods
| could be addressed by referencing the intent. This would be
| especially helpful in e.g. criminal law, where ambiguities or
| oversights in language (e.g. with regard to women raping men)
| often lead to both innocent people sitting in jail, and guilty
| people going free.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent
| people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying
| building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new
| materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing
| the intent_
|
| This is how American laws are usually written. Courts even
| venture into the debate records to discern intent.
| dmoy wrote:
| The intent bit in the laws is also is very brittle to
| changes in language. When the underlying words morph and
| mean different things, then hundreds of years later people
| kinda forget, and now we have a law that people think has a
| different intent.
|
| Similar to the way it's brittle when there are money
| numbers that don't include inflation (either on purpose or
| not), or (rarely) use a hilariously wrong inflation number
| instead of an index (say for a law passed during a time of
| very high inflation). Then the numbers change (or don't),
| and everything gets weird.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is why laws should sunset after some period of time,
| maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. At that time they should
| be reviewed, debated again, and decisions made as to
| whether each law should be renewed as-is, revised, or
| (the default) allowed to lapse.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| That's certainly an interesting idea, but i can imagine
| about 1000 different ways it could go wrong. Any
| sufficiently disruptive party could easily destroy the
| government just by preventing all laws from being
| reinstated. You could also just filibuster past the
| deadline for renewal to give your buds a couple days to
| break the law and then let it pass finally. You also
| would probably need a parallel bureaucracy just to handle
| the massively increased work load of governing.
|
| Maybe with a new nation that had time to adapt to the
| scenario it could form a functional system, but if
| implemented in America today I'd give it a not
| insignificant chance of actually crashing the entire
| government like a computer attempting to open a zip bomb
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Fair point. I'd like to think nobody would filibuster
| against popular laws such as those against murder, rape,
| theft, etc. but more that it's an opportunity for laws
| like "you can't sell a car on Sunday" or various
| controlled substance laws to quietly expire as public
| attitudes change.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| There have been some people pushing for every new law to
| include a sunset clause, but I don't know how you could
| enforce it for new laws.
| robocat wrote:
| Perhaps look at code refactoring as a model. Revising or
| rewriting code is often avoided because it is expensive
| and difficult. Applying existing test cases would have to
| be manual, not automated.
| xeromal wrote:
| I don't know anything about anything but a good example
| of what you're talking about has to be "a well regulated
| militia" or just the second amendment in general. It's
| wild how different people interpret it
| jonhohle wrote:
| That may be why the Supreme Court has chosen "history,
| text, and tradition" for constitutional evaluation.
| Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a
| law is frighteningly Orwellian.
| exe34 wrote:
| > Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a
| law is frighteningly Orwellian.
|
| reminds me of this: https://themedialine.org/by-
| region/irelands-push-to-alter-ic...
| hansvm wrote:
| If we didn't have a two-party nightmare willing to
| filibuster perfectly good policies as a tool to ramrod in
| alternative agendas, I think it'd work well to have laws
| with expiration dates. You'd have a natural forcing
| function by which language would be refined over time,
| laws would stay relevant, and the total body of
| legislation would stay at a manageable size.
|
| As something of a litmus test, if a crime is so minor
| that the police wouldn't do anything if you brought them
| multiple eyewitnesses, video evidence, and an address to
| knock on, then having that law on the books probably does
| more harm than good (many petty crimes like mild speeding
| would fit those criteria).
| thfuran wrote:
| I don't think (all) laws should expire. It'd mean that
| any delay in the legislature could potentially cause a
| real mess. But I do think a well-functioning legislature
| should spend a fair amount of time reviewing and perhaps
| revising the existing body of law.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The budgeting process already works like this and is a
| hot mess. And so do other things like the PATRIOT Act,
| the authorization of various agencies like FAA, etc.
| int_19h wrote:
| With e.g. the PATRIOT Act, the "hot mess" is that they
| just keep reauthorizing the provisions that require it.
| But I fail to see how it would be any better if they
| didn't even have to do that. At least the way things are,
| every time it comes up for re-auth, it also has to be
| renegotiated in the court of public opinion.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent
| people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying
| building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new
| materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing
| the intent.
|
| I see you are not American, and evidently are not really
| familiar with the second amendment.
| alexisread wrote:
| I think this is the crux of the problem, case law exists to
| help 'refine' and 'classify' a case ie. a crutch for an
| incomplete specification (the actual law). The 'workflow' is
| that the judgement on the current case informs the next ones
| and so on.
|
| I'd prefer it if previous cases had a bearing on
| rewriting/amending laws, rather than influencing a current
| case, and if the feeling is that a current judgement was not
| correct, rewrite/refine the law taking the case into account.
|
| That way a judgement does not require previous case research,
| this does mean that law needs to become a more well specified,
| and unambiguous language. We have decades of classification and
| computer language theory to draw from, and LLMs to stub-
| translate existing law, with exceptions going to a dead-letter-
| queue for individual appraisal.
|
| Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does
| someone know if they have broken it?
| hansvm wrote:
| > Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does
| someone know if they have broken it?
|
| This is especially important in a world where precious few
| scenarios allow ignorance as a legal defense.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| I'd prefer to keep the separation of powers intact
| (legislature writes/modifies laws, judiciary can strike them
| down but can't (or isn't supposed to) make up law... the
| exchange is not that different between development and QA :)
|
| your process seems reasonable though.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That's called civil law and is used in almost all of Europe.
| Common law seems quite strange, nebulous and inefficient seen
| from a civil law continent.
| wbl wrote:
| Congress can do this but chooses not to.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| I find there's a similar hidden alternate semantic reality for
| business reviews. "Rustic" means the building is falling apart.
| "Bustling" means it's impossible to find a seat. "Wholesome"
| means there's no professional standards or consistency.
|
| It's always an y in under-emphasis. It's like two generations
| of reviewers ago, there were a bunch of defamation lawsuits and
| every reviewer has mimicked this style since.
| taneq wrote:
| Much like systems code, right? :D
|
| (Mostly what I'm saying is that legalese is essentially
| natural(ish) language 'software' that has been developed and
| maintained over centuries by non-coders[1] and that most of the
| seemingly pointless or obtuse stuff is probably actually
| significant in weird edge cases.)
|
| [1] Not by any means saying that systems code is written by
| non-coders! But some of it is written by wizards and becomes
| Deep Magic that gets repeated by less eldrich contributors
| because if it isn't then the authors sometimes meet a fiery
| doom.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| It's not _written_ by non-coders, but it is _used_ by non-
| coders who do not always follow the way you expect them to
| use it...
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I also think lawyers don't find it worth optimising the
| language much, because the target audience is other lawyers who
| know all the incantations anyway.
|
| The target audience is _both_ lawyers and laymen. Every lawyer
| and politician who claims that it is not worth optimizing this
| also claims that they don 't want ordinary citizens to be
| capable of obeying the law.
|
| Tell this to every politican that if they don't work brutally
| hard on changing this fact they don't _want_ ordinary citizens
| to be capable of obeying the law, and that they are thus (in
| the view of the ordinary citizen) working on to establish a
| arbitrary justice. Thus, they work on destroying (in the view
| of the ordinary constitutional state) on actively destroying
| the constitutional state. So, what makes these politicians and
| lawyers than differ from a despicable high traitor?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Half the politicians _are_ lawyers, so it makes sense they 'd
| want to protect their own interests.
| mihaaly wrote:
| But the target audience is for laymen and not lawyers because
| we all have to abide the law and contracts and have to sign
| incomprehensive text that will have punishable consequence on
| us! How to obey the law/regulations/rules when you do not
| understand? My lawer should sign all my incomprehensible
| contracts and be punished for violations then, if the text is
| for them.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The target audience _isn't_ laypeople. That's why you have a
| right to legal representation. "Laypeople" language is way,
| way too ambiguous. Same reason you can't write computer code
| in lay language.
|
| ... there _are_ consequences for lawyers if they fail to do
| this translation effectively...
| johnisgood wrote:
| If people really cared, law would have been written in
| Lojban. :P
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Don't bad things happen anyway, via what we call "loopholes",
| et al? It seems like laws are sometimes written to be
| intentionally evaded by the lawyered class.
| zo1 wrote:
| My pet half-serious quip about laws/lawyers. Imagine writing a
| complex program without loops and functions, but you have
| access to C++ templates, and if statements can only be written
| as in-line switch statements that can't have any function
| calls. Oh and any "changes" to the code have to be done in the
| form of diff files that are included in the next program that
| may or may not be related. That's how laws are written.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Another form of hilarious incantation in legalese are the way
| "patches" do work. There's a complete vocabulary and way to
| formulate sentences to, literally, apply patches to older
| texts.
|
| It's "diff" but for legal text, using natural language (well as
| much as legalese is natural).
|
| I don't know in english but in french you can definitely have a
| legal text (say for your company statuses) and then patches
| when you did modify things. Or you can have the "consolidated"
| text, which is the text with the patches already applied (it's
| definitely more of an easier read as there's no need to jump
| back and forth between the patches).
|
| And of course the patches can reference another legalese text,
| which itself can reference another legalese text. And all of
| these can have... Patches.
|
| These patches/revisions going out of their way to introduce a
| patching logic using natural language is plain weird.
|
| Besides these patches/revisions, I'd say the second most WTF
| legalese thing is that somehow, at some point, where there were
| already rules and laws governing what a person could and could
| not do, someone, somewhere (in Rome probably), decided that we
| could create new persons, but not physical persons: entities
| dealt with as if they were individuals. But virtual.
|
| I did set up a company: I created a person. And we do
| shareholders meetings and vote stuff and go in front of a
| notary and that notary comes up with revisions and we patch the
| person I created by sending the patches to the authorities.
|
| It's completely mindboggling.
| freejazz wrote:
| You think its mindboggling that some laws refer to other
| laws? Really??
| tetha wrote:
| Good laws should also "scale out" into unknown complexity and
| situations.
|
| For example, every german has a right to control pictures of
| their own self, and the way the law was worded, it already
| applied an idea on the legality of sharing/distributing
| deepfakes of regular citizens.
|
| However, this kind of generalization requires very careful
| wording. Every single word and every single statement will be
| examined for inclusion and exclusion of situations across many
| court cases. This means it's hard to formulate these laws.
|
| And then you rely on age-old, court- and battle-proven
| formulations... even if they are clunky and not intuitive.
| freejazz wrote:
| This is just dunning kruger effect
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have
| long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences -- a feature
| known as "center-embedding." Linguists have previously found that
| this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to
| understand._
|
| Can anyone provide an example sentence from a legal source with
| center embedding? Multiple examples, ideally?
|
| It is _maddening_ that so much of the article is about this, but
| they refuse to actually show it to us.
| sbelskie wrote:
| > "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."
|
| > The paper offers this as a more understandable alternative,
| with the definition separated out:
|
| > "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."
|
| https://bcs.mit.edu/news/objection-no-one-can-understand-wha...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Would note that when drafting contracts, this is extremely
| natural to do. You notice you're reusing a concept and so
| define it at first mention. Or you write something and later
| notice an ambiguity. Speaking as a non-lawyer who drafts
| things from time to time (to be reviewed by a lawyer).
| crazygringo wrote:
| Indeed, I find the original to be less ambiguous. Why does
| the second version refer to payments and benefits in the
| first sentence, and then give them a name in the second
| sentence?
|
| In the revised version, I'm now very unclear whether
| Section 3a payments apply to the first sentence or not. The
| original makes it crystal-clear that they do; the revised
| version almost suggests they _don 't_, since they were
| explicitly added to sentence 2 but _not_ sentence 1.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They're often supreme Court cases over exactly this
| issue. Yeah varying definitions in different parts of
| legislation, which refer to different overlapping scopes
| or contacts. The court then goes to contextual clues for
| which reading is better supported. This can be the
| structural formatting of the legislation, public
| discourse of the legislature, or logical arguments.
| Overall, it's usually a mess.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Any person or persons who tampers, alters, misrepresents,
| enhances, or otherwise knowingly $VERBs the $NOUN, $NOUNs, or
| other representations of $NOUN, shall be in violation pursuant
| to regulations SS175.4 ($VERBing) and subject to penalties
| pursuant to SS96.3 (hereinafter PENALTIES).
| bux93 wrote:
| From the linked article, this particularly stands out:
|
| Among the features identified as more common in legal documents,
| one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long
| definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.
|
| [..]
|
| "For some reason, legal texts are filled with these center-
| embedded structures," Gibson says. "In normal language
| production, it's not natural to either write like that or to
| speak like that."
|
| - notice how there's a definition right in the middle of the
| article, and not at the beginning.
|
| Anyhow, there is a specific reason for having a definition not in
| chapter 1, article 1 (definitions) but somewhere down in article
| 15; lexical scope. That definition is not meant to be used in
| article 8 or 64, where the same word or phrase may be interpreted
| "as normal" (that is, still as a legal term, but not the one from
| article 5).
|
| This research seems to ignore that there are different styles of
| legal texts; you'll find that the civil code of any country is
| usually written in a different (more modern) style than the
| ancient "thou shalt not kill" bits of the penal code. Even if new
| crimes are added, those will be written in the same ye olde
| style, rather than an updated one (with definitions in chapter
| 1). Also, legal texts dealing with finance tend to be written in
| a different style from legal texts pertaining to consumer
| protection.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Great, so definitions have scope applied to them. Sounds like
| definitions defined in chapter 1, article 1 are global while
| the lexical scope is just a local. We should force them to use
| the key word "let" in front of the term (or which ever
| equivalent for your favorite language).
| Clamchop wrote:
| > notice how theres a definition right in the middle of the
| article, and not at the beginning.
|
| The criticism is of sentence structure, not document structure.
|
| > That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have
| long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences -- a
| feature known as "center-embedding." Linguists have previously
| found that this kind of structure can make text much more
| difficult to understand.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding
| nabla9 wrote:
| One reason for the style is established meaning for phrases.
| Lawyers have phraseology that has very specific meaning in the
| context.
| tux1968 wrote:
| That should be amenable to mechanical translation, even if
| perhaps it would need to be guided by the user a bit to confirm
| context. Since there are very specific meanings, they should
| each be equally expressible in less terse, but more
| understandable prose.
| sys32768 wrote:
| When I went toe-to-toe with a debt collector, I quickly
| discovered that many laws are vaguely written by lawyers to
| encourage litigation.
|
| The language in both the federal and state debt collection laws
| was so ambiguous that my research only lead me to consumer
| agencies saying I needed to ask an attorney. Or, I would find
| court cases where both sides argued over the language but the
| settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate
| when push came to shove.
|
| I stood my ground with the debt collector on refusing to pay
| interest on medical debt after paying off said debt, but they
| never admitted I was right, and I am still baffled by their
| arguments that only an attorney could navigate.
| Aachen wrote:
| > where both sides argued over the language but the settlement
| did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push
| came to shove.
|
| It does not matter what the law says, you always have to
| litigate if you want to force another party to do what you
| want. If the law says it and they don't do it, you have to. If
| case law confirms it and they don't do it, you also have to.
| Commonly referred to as the 90% of the law: they have what's
| yours, but it's up to you to put in the effort to prove it and
| get anything back at all
|
| Judges never alter law made by the legislator, in any (trias
| politica) legal system that I know of (Netherlands mainly, but
| also what I read of UK law and friends), but in all of the
| aforementioned: the case law is an important aspect of your
| obligations and rights. One refers to it as basically equal to
| law, but it doesn't alter the law itself
| bombcar wrote:
| Judges at least in the USA can alter the law, in two ways:
|
| 1. They can determine the law does not apply
|
| 2. They can decide the law collides with another, higher
| ranking law and so does not apply
|
| Both don't really do anything unless the other judges start
| to agree with them, in which case people stop bringing the
| cases because they know they'll lose.
|
| The cost of fighting the case is almost always way more than
| the value of the case, so they'll avoid fighting it if the
| outcome is pretty well determined. This is one case where you
| have an advantage; you can defend yourself pro se (and likely
| lose) but the very cost of attacking your pro se defense is
| often way more than the value they get from you.
| floxy wrote:
| >...In the real world, people usually attempt to solve problems
| by forming hypotheses and then testing them against the facts
| as they know them. When the facts confirm the hypotheses, they
| are accepted as true, although subject to re-evaluation as new
| evidence is discovered. This is a successful method of
| reasoning about scientific and other empirical matters because
| the physical world has a definite, unique structure. It works
| because the laws of nature are consistent. In the real world,
| it is entirely appropriate to assume that once you have
| confirmed your hypothesis, all other hypotheses inconsistent
| with it are incorrect.
|
| > In the legal world, however, this assumption does not hold.
| This is because unlike the laws of nature, political laws are
| not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their
| conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and
| principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can
| demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set
| of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound
| argument can be found for any legal conclusion.
|
| The Myth of the Rule of Law
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-JhqpU3_0r_HL06hP-5DABhEtG...
| mjburgess wrote:
| The law is not a set of propositions, so this issue does not
| arise. The law is a linguistic artefact which requires
| interpretation to derive propositions, ie., pragmatics. The
| pragmatic context of interpretation, hemmed-in by precedent,
| dramatically narrows the range of admissible "legal
| propositions" in any given legal context.
|
| The idea that the law is, or should be, a canonical set of
| propositions is the real "myth" here, one espoused by people
| who haven't thought for a moment how such a set of
| propositions could ever be constructed.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Seems completely mistaken and ignores work on declarative vs
| procedural writing, principles vs rules, etc. Minimizing
| cognitive load for the reader ("plain language") is useful in
| some cases and a complete mistake in others.
| WBrentWilliams wrote:
| I'm not certain is if this is because I live in a city with a
| well-known law school, or if Lawrence Lessig dropped the idea
| into my thoughts first.
|
| The idea: The first duty of any court of law is to defend its own
| existence.
|
| My thesis is that this first duty colors in the rest of the legal
| profession, including why laws, orders, and proclamations are
| written in a certain way.
|
| Minor point: The article calls out in-place definitions. Useful,
| if unwieldly, when footnote and endnote conventions have yet to
| have been defined and practiced.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| My favorite summary of this MIT press release us this three-word
| quote by the author: "we think maybe...".
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Here's a draft of the actual paper:
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publica...
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I've been studying pseudo-legal theories
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudolaw) since before they were
| called pseudo-legal theories and when I first got into it I was
| calling it legal spellcasting for exactly this reason: people
| seem to think that because things with the force of law sound
| arcane and use a lot of old grammatical constructs that means
| that things that sound arcane and use a lot of old grammatical
| constructs are things with the force of law. The thing is, in a
| way they're right: there are certain phrases that carry legal
| force. "I am invoking my right to remain silent", "I don't
| consent to a search", "I want a lawyer", but not, and this is
| part of where it really starts to feel like spellcasting, "why
| don't you just give me a lawyer dog" (https://slate.com/news-and-
| politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for...). It's an opaque system
| understood only by a learned few but with incredible bearing on
| everyday life for those outside the legal literati. There are
| magic words that, if invoked correctly, can thwart an army in
| their tracks and give you the power to compel people to carry out
| your will but if invoked incorrectly can lead to your utter
| destruction. Does that sound like sorcery to you? Because it does
| to a lot of people, and a lot of unscrupulous actors are writing
| and selling false grimoires to people that promise a set of magic
| words that will increase their power.
|
| "I'm not driving, I'm travelling" is a spell that will protect
| you from highwaymen who wish to extort you for using your car
|
| Put your index finger on the top of your head, spin around 3
| times counterclockwise, say "I assert my natural personhood as a
| freeman-upon-the-land" and burn your driver's license. That's a
| ritual to avoid paying taxes.
|
| Of course none of it works. But it feels like things that work.
| Also our legal system is so inconsistent and there's so much
| leeway in what to charge and how to charge it that sometimes it
| does actually work, or at least seems to. So you read about the
| incantations that genuinely do work, then you read about the ones
| that people claim work and that will give you the legal
| equivalent to superpowers, then you get pulled over and try
| invoking your right to travel under the uniform commercial code
| as a sovereign citizen. The cop was gonna let you go anyway, you
| just had a blinker out, and now he's baffled by your bullshit and
| doesn't feel like dealing with it so he gives you a verbal
| warning and you go home thinking "Wow, I actually backed that cop
| down. This stuff does really work. Amazing."
| JackFr wrote:
| Center embedding = lexical scoping for clauses which need to
| withstand adversarial interpretations.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| So many words and not a single example.
|
| This research also seems to be a little bit shallow. There is a
| lot of existing scholarship on legal language (Legal English and
| Legal French in Anglophone countries, Juristische Fachsprache in
| German, etc.). Maybe the underlying paper addresses this already,
| but the article makes it seem as if this is all groundbreaking.
| notatoad wrote:
| every time i have cause to go and check the text of a law in my
| country, i'm always a bit surprised about how understandable it
| actually is. there's the reputation for legalese, but, for
| example, this is perfectly legible to me, a person with no legal
| experience
|
| https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-21/page-2.html#h-...
| roughly wrote:
| A friend described software engineering as wizardry, in the D&D
| 5E sense - you study the arcane systems that underpin the modern
| world, learn how they worked, and then learn how to manipulate
| them to affect the world in the way you want - and described
| lawyers as clerics: you learn how to appeal to the gods (courts,
| cops, the myriad powers of the state) to cause those powers to
| intercede on your behalf, mostly by learning the phrases and
| chants that impel those powers to act.
|
| (And I suppose in that taxonomy, sorcerers are the wealthy:
| either by birth or by some form of ritual they have gained a
| power that causes things in the world to happen the way they want
| them to.)
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Two things a lawyer told me, in a social setting, not a
| consultation.
|
| 1. Legal terminology has specific meanings, sometimes going back
| hundreds of years, with a multitude of rulings to define that
| meaning.
|
| 2. If you aren't a lawyer, don't use lawyer language in a
| contract. Courts will interpret ambiguity against the drafter of
| the contract. Better to use normal language.
| croemer wrote:
| Actual paper, not the press release:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121
|
| Preprint via SSRN:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4933363
|
| One should generally avoid press releases as much as possible,
| they usually exaggerate.
| bparsons wrote:
| Canadian laws are written in fairly plain language. This is
| partly for accessibility purposes, and partly because they must
| be duplicated in both French and English and mean exactly the
| same thing.
|
| Where laws and regulations get complicated is when they are
| referring to other documents. The Canadian Parliament has done a
| wonderful job creating a user interface for the different
| iterations of bills, and linking them to video and text of the
| debates and votes. https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bills
| jrm4 wrote:
| Is this going to be _another_ one of those things where the tech
| people incorrectly believe that the law is broken because their
| brains are kind of incompatible with how law actually works?
|
| Legal writing is doing just fine. It's not _anything like code_
| nor can it be expected to be.
| sinkasapa wrote:
| It seems like the central claim of the study is that there is an
| increased use of center embeddings in legal texts in comparison
| to non-legal texts and casuals peach. I'm seeing a lot of
| debating and presentations of opinions about various aspects of
| legalese in the comments, but the number of center embeddings in
| a document is measurable, and is in no way associated with
| clarity, or precision. It is known that beyond one or two center
| embeddings, most people find a sentence incomprehensible. There
| is no way that a sentence like "The dog the cat the rat chased
| ate saw the man wink." is more clear than some semi-paraphrase,
| which does not use center embeddings, such as "The rat chased the
| cat who ate the dog who saw the man wink." It seems reasonable
| that the only explanation the researchers could find for such
| behavior is that it seemed to have some sociological value in
| invoking authority. There is no sense in which center embeddings
| help to avoid lexical ambiguity. They are simply difficult to
| parse.
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