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.
I worked in discovery. A lot of subpoenas still request microfiche and other formats that likely haven't been used in decades. Because there's that one clinic who still uses them who thinks "any and all records" must imply "except if you think of some convoluted exception"
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.
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.
In law such words are called terms of art - but most lawyers know them and there's no reason for their use to create incomprehensible documents. It's not like every other word is a term of art.
When I was I law school they taught us to write as clearly as possible and avoid legalese. Hopefully that catches on, I don't think legalese is good or necessary. Clarity is better
Really the main problem is trust and credibility, or lack thereof. Which necissitates all of these adaptations.
There’s a famous story of Warren Buffet buying Nebraska Furnitur Mart with no paperwork whatsoever, just some verbal assurances, a handshake, and a TV interview with the esteemed owner.
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.
Law and technical standards are two places where language must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.
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!
The article disagrees with your comment. They found that the plainer English laws would be no less enforceable.
Here's an example. Patent lawyers absolutely love the word "plurality", a very uncommon word in normal English. They mean "more than one", but why don't they say that? It's not only clearer but it's also less ambiguous (check the many definitions of "plurality").
It's because they are copying a rule without thinking about it. Other examples of that:
* "an historical occasion" - this is wrong, it's "a historical occasion", but people hear it and think it's some special rule
* Not using "I" in research papers, even with a single author! There's no rule that requires this but people think there is. I read a paper once that used "I". It was great.
I'm writing a nonfiction book about why people play a certain video game. It's been interesting to switch between 'I' for when I'm making a novel or specific point and 'we' when I need the first person but what I'm saying is the consensus point or common experience. I recommend the same in academic writing. I'm sure that this is a flamewar topic now that I think about it though, aha.
Agreed, I'm a proponent of using "we" in technical communication, because the "I" is not important and should not be emphasized. This goes against popular writing advice, but I don't think the advice is good.
I like to use words like "thus", "hence", and "therefore" a lot -- but this is because, as a mathematician, I picked up a style of writing that has been deeply influenced by the mathematics I learned.
For that matter, the first day I was in Great Britain, I noticed that the other Americans I met had British accents, and I noticed in the few hours talking with them, I was already picking up on the accent myself.
It's only natural to pick up the language and idioms of the cultures you happen to be immersed in!
(And this applies to Law and Engineering as much as anything else, too.)
I agree, but "thus", "hence" and "therefore" are fairly normal words. "Plurality" and the grammatical structures of lawyers are on another level.
I would say maths has its own issues with language accessibility, but they're a bit different from law. Probably the biggest problem is naming everything after people instead of coming up with meaningful names.
There is nothing wrong with the use of ‘an’ before ‘history’ and the forms of that lemma. It is unusual, and perhaps pretentious or otherwise silly, but only in the same way as ‘connexion’ is an unusual (&c) but perfectly correct spelling.
It is one of the few things in language that definitely is wrong.
The point of saying "an" instead of "a" is to make it easier to say a following word that starts with a soft sound (there's probably a technical term).
"A igloo" is hard to say, so we change it to "An igloo" which is a lot easier.
"A history lesson" is not hard to say so there's no need for "an".
Have you ever said "an history lesson" or even heard anyone say that?
I would assume it has to do with the next word. You wouldn't say "a occasion", you say "an occasion" so then it's natural to say "an historical occasion" as well.
The use of “an” with “history” is likely a holdover of its French origins where the h isn’t pronounced or from English dialects where the h isn’t pronounced. It’s essentially a learned behavior at this point. If it was used solely because of ease of pronunciation we’d expect also to see “an history”, “an high five”, “an hit record”.
But, in any case, for those who pronounce the h, “a historical” is easier to say.
In the case of lawyers I’d suspect tradition first and fear of typos reversing meaning (“ahistorical”) second.
Precisely. That is incorrect because the purpose of "an" is to make the first part of a word easier to say, and "historical" and "history" start in exactly the same way.
You're only doing it because you've heard other people do it and you think there's some special rule for it. Maybe subconsciously even.
And don't say "you can't say something is wrong in language because prescriptivism Vs descriptivism etc."
Yes generally it is the case that language is defined by how it is used. This is an exception, where something has a very very clear purpose and usage, and you're doing it wrong.
I actually can't think of any clearer cases where the prescriptivists are right. It would have to be something so obvious you don't even think about it, like using spaces between words. Yet for some reason everyone messes up "a historical". It's as bizarre as if everyone omitted spaces before "historical" but not "history" or any other words.
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.
Just being pedantic and curious here: I'm assuming you're using "lawyer" casually with a "language" qualifier, not authorised to give professional legal advice, or specialising in legal language nuances?
> 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." :)
I like to use the word "superstition" to describe my attempts to prevent migraines by wearing sunglasses, eating chocolate, and avoiding orange juice. I only have vague corollaries to believe these are helpful (particularly since I don't get migraines often, as awful as it is when I get hit by one), so it's not fair to attribute any of these with certainty -- but it's also not fair to dismiss them out of hand, either.
Sure, some "superstitions" are the result of random folklore, and can be ignored without consequence. (Knock on wood!) But others are the result of meme-ized facts, passed on via something that's folklorish and easy to remember to share.
Thus, it is fair to use the word "superstition" to describe something you think might be harmless, but may actually have serious consequences, if ignored, after all.
I'm pretty sure "superstition" was meant more weakly and "sometimes they are right" was meant more strongly than you're interpreting it.
It's irrational to think the awkward phrasing is actually better, but when you're being judged by other people sometimes they're going to enforce the bias.
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)
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.
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Well to add to that, representing yourself is a really bad optics and you can't fervently defend yourselves. That's why even lawyers when put on trial will use other lawyers.
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.
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…
I am sorry but law is for every citizen who has to obey it, so it is for everyone and everyone have to understand not only lawyers, are you sure you know what you are saying?
There can be no lawyer at every time you do almost anything in life, be in traffic, raise children, participate in education, purchase something, travel, anything! Do you need an engineer sitting right next to you when you turn on the light or operate a vechicle? No! You need them for advanced things.
If you argue that ALL law have to be understood only by lawyers then you are very very lost! What you have to obey, you have to understand! At least the relevant part (nuclear waste storage is perhaps not for you, I am just guessing), but even knowing which part is relevant you need to understand! Not enough lawyers to sit next to everyone guiding through everyday life that is regulated by law!
It is difficult to understand because it made to sound ominous (fucked up for everyone), that's it, see the article. Form over essence. Also evolving without effort for restructuring so it becomes overcomplicated (see article). All formality over practicality and common sense, that's why it is so convoluted, or "it’s an accidental property", mimicing for centuries.
Also don't mix up everyday language here used with friends over a beer that could be vague for outsiders - or themselves - but there ARE ways to be specific and understood with ordinary people too using the generic communication method law uses too: language. That could been used, that is being used in other areas in communicating towards layman (like doctors, I mean the smart ones, not engulfing you with latin explaining your condition and prognosis, right? Also instruction manuals for complex gadgets are not in ancient greek just for the sake of it, right, but ordinary and specific or even formal language that are still being understood by the ordinary consumer, as that is important.)
Additionally: "Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.". I rest my case.
Everyone knows (sans lawyer) you can’t kill people, steal things, run red lights, commit fraud, lie in contracts, and so on.
Regarding your closing argument, what a wonderful argument against your point. Of course plain language contracts are just as enforceable as traditional ones. That is, you cannot argue, “your honor, this contract was written in plain language therefore it is not valid.”
But enforceability is a distinct concept from (really a subset of) defensibility. The problem with plain language is it tends to be less exhaustive and more ambiguous, which while enforceable (a valid contract with force of law) will be easier to wiggle out of in court.
To be clear, I understand your point and share your desire for this to be the case. Just having worked in a complex regulatory environment (health data), I don’t see it as even close to realistic, and it’s unrealistic for very good reasons.
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.
(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.
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.
>
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?
"(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!
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in.
And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
I'm not taking a position for or against the argument that law is code, but making the observation that it contradicts itself. Particularly in the case of the 2nd amendment. The bill of rights is supposed to be a limitation on government itself, so this isn't merely a matter of jurisdiction. In the state I reside in, I can put a loaded gun in my pocket and go about my daily business. In my birth state it would be a crime to conceal it without a permit, and in NYC it would be a 3-1/2 year minimum sentence (unless you're an NFL player [1] in which case you get a plea deal of 2 years, so somehow "mandatory minimum" changes it's meaning)
If I were to translate this into code, it would mean that variables that were constant will sometimes still change value. It would mean that operations on data would differ depending on the scope in which the operations were applied. And it would mean that certain variables that were closer to the base address (more money) would operate differently than variables stored in distant memory offsets [2].
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.
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.
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.
And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable.
Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs.
I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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
I'm watching the one where they gutted the Chevron decision because they don't want officials, nominated by the elected President, having sway over how regulations are enforced, and instead want judges (who have no real accountability past their confirmation by the Senate) to do that job instead, despite them not having any real expertise in many of the fields that the US federal government regulates.
That, to me, sounds a lot like a judiciary that wants to have things decided via the interpretation of legalese by a lawyer instead of by facts as determined by the present will of the people.
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.
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
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.
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"?
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.
> 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)... -_-
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).
'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.
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.
Yeah, I've given up on expecting to know what people will understand "next Wednesday" to mean. I either say "this coming Wednesday" or "next week on Wednesday". Problems solved.
Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."
If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."
> '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".
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.
> 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.
Yeah, I think the weekend nomenclature is definitely trickier.
> 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.
To my ear, this is wrong, but I think you're right that it's more common. I think 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' are fuzzier than 'this Tuesday' and 'next Tuesday' because of that misalignment I pointed to before, where 'the weekend' is thought of as a thing that comes at the end of a week, but how we write it most calendars where I live is as a thing that bookends the week on each side.
But I couldn't take up the usage you describe even if I moved to a region where it was predominant, I think. How could I abide a situation where 'this Saturday' occurs during 'next weekend'? That's simply madness. :D
(It's amazing how much we humans manage to communicate with something as messy as natural language-- perhaps especially amazing to programmer-brained people like me, who take some comfort and ease from the simplicity and neatness of the artificial formalisms we work with every day.)
i think the difference is the frequency with which it is necessary to differentiate "this" and "next".
for weekends, most of the time most people are talking in ways that make "this weekend" "the next weekend to occur". so here, "this" and "next" are effectively synonymous.
for days of the week, however, it is more often important to differentiate "this Thursday" (occuring in a couple of days from now, during this week) and "next thursday" (occuring in more than 7 days from now, as part of next week).
If my hunch is correct, it would make conventions highly dependent on social scheduling frequency in a culture.
And in reading your comment, I just realized there's a difference between casual conversation and writing something down.
I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'll put it in the calendar, the 8th it is!" and you reply with "No, I meant the 15th" -- and this reduces the ambiguity. This kind of thing would be happening in "real time", so being perfectly clear isn't as important.
However, if you write "next Wednesday" in a contract, and then complete it on the 15th instead of the 8th, and it's taken to Court ... it's a lot harder to figure out what the the original conversation was like, that led to the writing of the contract!
Hence, it makes sense to use as unambiguous language as possible when writing a contract.
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.
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).
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!
> 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
> 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.
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 (§3.14.159) unless working (§8.6.753) in a job (§127.0.1) 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
> 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.
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
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.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to say "English can get bent for having nuance" I was speaking about them from a legal point of view, and (again) I emphasize that based on your examples the difference matters solely in sentencing not "how illegal" they are
To circle back to the "if law were programming" idea, I think of all the nuances you cited as belonging in any "then" clauses, not the "if" clauses of legalese
if made_dead:
# determine punishment
if premeditated:
...
elif road_rage and crime_scene.contains({"gun"}):
# a kind of very, very slightly premeditation
...
else:
# and here one can get into [in]voluntary made dead
because (as I ham-fistedly tried to get at) there are very, very few cases in the law where one human can legally end the life of another human so it's silly to try and split hairs about "why" except for how much revenge(?) society wants to extract from them for the wrongdoing
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.
I'd take out the reference to "job" -- because the only State violence where it's legal to commit violence against another person without provocation is in the Military (and even then, it's subject to Rules of Engagement and other protocols); whereas even though police have powers not normally exercised by other citizens to arrest people, both police and citizens have the right to respond to lethal force with lethal force, which can often (but not always -- "lethal" can mean severe maiming, for example, or an attempt to incapacitate) lead to the death of the person being responded to.
I would like to see general law subject to a restriction like that. But law that applies to specialized domains can be written such that anyone reasonably proficient in that domain can understand it.
What should be done for the high-school freshman dropout who goes on to get a commercial driver's license, and then goes on to get an endorsement for transporting hazardous materials?
But murder and manslaughter aren't simply "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention", that's why we have different degrees of each. Because you have to define what intention means. Savagely beating somebody to death, while believing they'll probably survive - is that with intention or without? There's also other forms of homicide than just manslaughter and murder!
I think that's why these terms exist, because they become shorthand for longwinded definitions that may need to be very precise.
FWIW, judges in England (or maybe UK) have flip-flopped on this question as recently as in 2003. (See "R v G") That said maybe the problem is that the UK doesn't have different degrees of murder. But still.
Real life can be complicated and moral/legal questions can be hard to determine.
I actually initially did load the Toki Pona wikipedia page because I (erroneously) thought TP was just a constrained version of English and not its own language. So, once I saw it was not one of the established natural languages that are used in law/contracts/treaties I closed the page
If we were going to get 80 year old Senators to learn a new language, I'd lobby for Lojban which is at least plausibly designed for representing unambiguous semantics
I've mentioned before that any laws that are written in formal languages seems great from the metric of keeping "interpretation" cases out of the judicial system but would put society back into the "priests read Latin and tell the plebs what God really meant, trustmebro" and that's for sure no bueno
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.
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+....
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Legalese looks an awful lot like code (I'm a programmer) meant to cover all edge cases and not permitting subroutines. It would be an awful lot clearer if they used a single term and then defined it after the main body of the law. Put as much as possible into a global appendix--as a layman occasionally trying to look up a law I find eternal references to as defined by xxxx.
And require the state to publish a version with hyperlinks and hover text.
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.
> "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.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b... because evidently the $(make DESTDIR= install) is just kidding
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.
Free Software predates Open Source, so that's not an ideal conflating.
I get where you are coming from though. The choice of the word "Free" in "Free Software" isn't ideal because the word "Free" has multiple meanings. Most people (especially non-tech users) assume it means "no cost" rather than "unencumbered".
So yes, it would have been simpler either a different name. Hindsight is perfect.
That said Free Software is different to Open Source (although lots of tech folk conflate the two.) That aside, it doesn't stop people adding their own (incorrect) requirements or expectations, as seen elsewhere in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
Legalese would be a lot easier to understand if they did write it like an english programming language. “If age < 21 then let alcohol = illegal” is pretty succinct and unambiguous compared to however they actually wrote that statement in legalese.
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.
>...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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
I’m just curious. Did the writers of the Bill of Rights expect this sort of constant reinterpretation of the laws to suit modern cases that we see today? Or did they actually believe that the ink was dry so to speak?
> 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.
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.
Elsewhere I have specifically used the 2nd amendment at an example of why simple laws don't work.
Are arms permitted to everyone or only to members of a militia? And it's a binary, no restrictions on what type of arms.
Look at current gun law vs the wording of the 2nd, how can you possibly relate the two?? (Although in some cases I can see other laws being relevant. There are things you can possess but neither store nor transport due to the rules around hazardous materials. Top of the list: Tannerite. You buy it as two separate containers, you're free to handle it as you choose. Once they're mixed it's a high explosive and subject to all the handling rules of high explosives. You can detonate it or you can destroy it, that's it. Also, high power amateur rocket motors. Lots of rules about storing and transporting them that are simply impossible for many users--think about what would happen in a fire.)
I don’t think that says anything about the bill of rights. If anything it strengthens ops point that piling on this language is seemingly done to generate confusion and maybe even to enable selective enforcement of certain prosecution, as we’ve seen with the Hunter Biden fiasco.
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
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.
> "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.
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?
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.
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.
"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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
Thank you, I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger point of discussion. The whole methodology and the conclusions drawn are dubious at best. I guess most people didn't read the article!
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.
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
Yeah. I'd like to see a system where a person or organization can put up say $100k, specify an act or series of acts and have it litigated as if it were real. There's no juries or the like as the "facts" are laid down at the start. You win, you get back your money and it becomes part of case law just as if it were real, including any compensation due innocent defendants. (Note that if the state is not required to defend it, they're free to immediately concede, return your money and admit the stated actions are legal.)
Where are you going to get an appropriate set of facts from, though? You're essentially proposing a legal thought experiment, but thought experiments are notorious for setting up unrealistic sets of facts to be based on - how often does a scenario exactly like the trolley problem arise, and is it even justified to extrapolate any moral conclusions from that to other scenarios? There is a legal saying - "hard cases make bad law". The temptation in your system would be to make hard cases, for the same reason hard cases are prevalent in ethical philosophy. The effect on the resulting law is predictable.
So you need to work essentially from cases that have gone through at least court case. That's called an appeal, and it already exists.
If the facts don't match reality you've gone to all the effort for nothing--people aren't going to do it. And if hard cases make bad law the legislature should do it's job and fix the law!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
This was literally the case when we look at history surrounding Jim Crowe laws. They were purpose built to disenfranchise. You always have to wonder what the actual intent of a given law is. The incentive to work in an ulterior motive within the text is always going to be there. And we have not designed a system to be robust to that. Most we can do is attempt to pass yet another law that might rectify the “bad” one but that one itself might be filled with bullshit. Pork barrel politics is a real phenomenon and a side effect of our legal system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
>> 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.
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.
Yes, 100% - because as the "business owner" I've been the one responsible for actually passing the signed agreements back and forth, so I would have seen the notarization.
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
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.
> 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.
> “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.”
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).
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.
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.
Not just contracts, this is a variation of an "aside" and I've seen it often enough in books that it's normal to me. I do it pretty regularly in comments here, too.
Any person or persons who tampers, alters, misrepresents, enhances, or otherwise knowingly $VERBs the $NOUN, $NOUNs, or other representations of $NOUN, shall be in violation pursuant to regulations §175.4 ($VERBing) and subject to penalties pursuant to §96.3 (hereinafter PENALTIES).
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.
Almost every software engineer strives to write code in a clear and concise manner. However, usually we produce a pile of spaghetti. Why is that? We all know why.
Now, take those reasons and imagine you’re in this situation:
You’re working on a codebase that has been around for 200+ years, you don’t fully understand the code you are editing, the requirements are somewhat vague (“i know it when i see it”), people calling the shots are demanding that you make ad-hoc exemptions for them for political reasons, the coding style guidelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and worst of all you cant compile the code and test whether it works, so you dry-run the scenarios in your head and hope you don’t miss any weird test cases.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
At least on a quick reading, the study overlooks the adversarial nature of legal drafting. Laws and contracts are optimized to be quick to write while avoiding the constructions that are easy to attack. Put differently, it’s often an attempt to write defensively while being lazy.
Center embedding—embedding a definition of a subject or object in the middle of a sentence—is hard to read but makes it harder to argue that a particular definition doesn’t apply to a particular sentence. For many hard to read constructions, you can probably achieve the same result in a way that’s easier to read while being just as hard to attack, but that might take more analysis during the writing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
This tendency toward "center-embedding" seems similar to the tendency of developers to use long function names with embedded descriptions. I find these names highly distracting and oftentimes cryptic. Not being a "developer", I would rather names be short, e.g., like Arthur Whitney makes them, so the code fits better on the page. Then, if necessary, place the descriptions of each function in a separate section or file. Meanwhile I have learned to tolerate developer tendencies.
I like looking things up. Legal documents frequently have definitions in a separate section. In order to read a document it is necessary to refer to the definitions section. I have found that many businesspeople struggle with defined terms in legal documents. They often ignore that terms may be defined and fail to appreciate the siginifcance of the definitions.
>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.
>To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.
It's not clear from the description of the findings that the language participants used was to borrow authority ("magic incantation hypothesis"). In fact, any number of other conclusions could be reached.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
As described, the research sounds weak. They have a hypothesis: "laws are written that way due to style imitation." And their proof of that hypnosis is to weakly reject an entirely different hypothesis "the magic spell hypothesis."
Poor sloppy work. As likely to misleading as clarify.
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.
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.
One reason why legalese is so incomprehensible is because it has to cover all conceivable edge and corner cases explicitly. It rubs up against the limits of human language.
I think here's where LLM can shine. Do you think that having LLM to digest and translate the incomprehensible laws will help people to understand them better?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Section 1. Definitions
(a) "Pedestrian" shall mean any natural person afoot or using a means of conveyance propelled by human power other than a bicycle, including but not limited to rollerskates, skateboards, or similar devices, or who is operating a wheelchair or other mobility device.
(b) "Roadway" shall mean that portion of any street, highway, or other public thoroughfare improved, designed, or ordinarily used for vehicular travel.
(c) "Crosswalk" shall mean:
(1) That portion of a roadway distinctly indicated for pedestrian crossing by lines or other markings on the surface; or
(2) In the absence of such markings, that portion of a roadway included within the prolongation or connection of the boundary lines of the adjacent sidewalk at intersections.
(d) "Jaywalking" shall mean any unauthorized crossing of a roadway by a pedestrian, including but not limited to crossing at a location other than a crosswalk where such a crosswalk is provided, or crossing at a time or in a manner contrary to posted traffic control signals or lawful instructions of a peace officer or traffic control device.
Section 2. Prohibition
(a) It shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross any roadway at any point other than within a marked or unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, except as otherwise expressly authorized by law.
(b) Where traffic control signals are in operation, it shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross a roadway against such signals or contrary to the instructions of any authorized traffic control device or peace officer.
Section 3. Exceptions
Notwithstanding Section 2, the prohibitions set forth herein shall not apply to:
(a) Any pedestrian acting in compliance with the lawful order, signal, or direction of a peace officer or other authorized official.
(b) Any pedestrian who, due to an emergency or hazard, must cross at a point other than a designated crosswalk to avoid imminent harm, provided such crossing is effected with reasonable care and caution.
Section 4. Penalties
Any person found to be in violation of this ordinance shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than [Amount] per offense, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction. Nothing herein shall preclude the imposition of additional sanctions as provided by law or the exercise of discretion by the issuing authority in accordance with applicable statutes and regulations.
Section 5. Severability
If any provision of this ordinance, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, shall be deemed invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, such invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this ordinance, which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this ordinance are hereby declared severable.
Section 6. Effective Date
This ordinance shall take effect on [Effective Date], and all acts or omissions occurring on or after such date shall be subject to its terms.
SECTION 1. DEFINISHUNS ‘N DAT
(a) "Pedestrian" be meanin’ any geezer on foot or rollin’ on them mad skates, blades, boards, or in a chair what goes slow, innit.
(b) "Roadway" be that big bit o’ street where dem cars be cruisin’, not the sidewalk where you can chill wit’ your crew.
(c) "Crosswalk" be them stripey bits what you see painted on da road, so peeps know where to cross like good boys ‘n girls.
SECTION 2. NO DODGY CROSSIN’
(a) Hear dis: You is well not allowed to stroll, swagger, or roll across da street anywhere except those official crossin’ zones, ya get me? Don’t be thinkin’ you can just hop in front of them ridez wherever you want, aight?
(b) If there’s lights flashin’ “Don’t Walk,” or a copper tellin’ you “Oi, stay put,” you best do what they say, ‘cos you ain’t special. Ignore ‘em, and you is well outta order.
SECTION 3. EXCEPTIONS N’ STUFF
(a) If a proper rozzer or traffic geezer says “Go,” then you can go, blud. Proper authoritay, innit.
(b) If da place is on fire, zombies is about, or summin’ else mad dangerous is goin’ down, you can cross outside da lines if dat’s the only way to save ya pretty face. Use your noggin, yeah?
SECTION 4. PUNISHMENT, BLUD
If we catch you playin’ chicken with da traffic and doin’ da jaywalk bizness, you gonna get slapped wiv a fine (cash money, innit). How much dough you owe depends on what da big men in robes say, so don’t get cheecky. You pay up, show respeck, and walk off like a proper geezer next time.
SECTION 5. SEVERABILITEY (BIG WORD, INNIT)
If da judge says some bit of dis law is off its rocker, da rest still stands tall, bruv. No wigglin’ out just ‘cos one bit is messed up.
SECTION 6. WHEN IT KICKS IN
When we say so, you better watch dem feet. No mo’ crossin’ streets all willy-nilly. Safe? Safe.
*WITCHES’ DECREE AGAINST UNLAWFUL ROADWAY PASSAGE (AS HEREINAFTER SET FORTH)*
First Witch (intoning):
Thrice the blind crow caws at night,
Thrice the lantern’s waning light,
Thrice again, and so we say,
A binding writ we cast this day.
Second Witch (proclaiming):
By yew and ash, and roadside charm,
By wheel of cart and horse’s alarm,
No mortal foot shall traverse the thoroughfare
Except at Proper Pedestrian Passages, duly designated therein and thereto,
Whereat painted lines, or lawful signals,
Shall serve as solemn guide and direction.
Third Witch (forewarning):
Should any soul, notwithstanding these provisions,
Cross the roadway other than as herein provided,
Or disregard such authorized signals or official commands,
Said soul shall be subject to assessment of a pecuniary forfeiture,
Herewith imposed and enforceable by the sovereign’s agents,
Until due satisfaction of all fines and penalties be rendered.
All Witches (in chorus, concluding):
Double, double, heed and trouble;
Behold this decree that none shall rebuttle.
In witness whereof, we sisters three,
Have set our seal upon this fee:
Any who transgress this law be warned,
Within these words their fates be formed.
*Article the First (Definitions):*
(a) “Pedestrian,” says ye, be any swabbie wanderin’ on foot or rollin’ along in some contraption not be driven by the wind nor the fire in the belly of a mighty engine.
(b) “Roadway,” ye scurvy knaves, be that stretch o’ land claimed by wagons, coaches, and other wheeled beasts o’ burden, not meant fer yer careless trot about.
(c) “Crosswalk,” be them stripes on the deck of the street, showin’ where honest folk cross without fear o’ keelhaul or lash.
*Article the Second (Prohibitions):*
(a) Let it be known to all ye landlubbers: ‘Tis forbidden to cross the roadway at any point save that which be designated by the stripes or markers. Ye do not scurry before the carriages and coaches like a rat on a spar!
(b) Should there be signals or lights givin’ order to halt or proceed, ye must heed ‘em like the captain’s command. Defy ‘em, and ye be walkin’ the plank into the arms o’ the law!
*Article the Third (Exceptions and Pardons):*
(a) If an officer o’ the King or a lawful master-at-arms waves ye across, then by the beard of Blackbeard, ye may cross forthwith, no penalty clingin’ to yer breeches.
(b) If a dire emergency forces yer hand—fire upon the docks, or beasts run amok—ye may cross where ye must, provided ye don’t toss caution to the wind, lest ye be crushed under wheel or hoof.
*Article the Fourth (Penalties and Booty):*
Any scallywag who dares cross outside them stripes or disobeys them signals shall face a fine, a forfeit o’ coin, set by the courts of the Crown. Pay ye must, or swing in the rigging of the king’s justice! Yarr!
*Article the Fifth (Severability):*
If some learned barrister finds a hitch in one line o’ this here law, fear not. The rest of the Articles stand as tall as a mainsail in a gale, remainin’ firm and unbroken.
*Article the Sixth (When the Edict Takes Hold):*
From the day the Crown’s seal is fixed, this law be in full force. So mind yer step, ye scurvy dogs, and cross at the proper marks lest ye taste the lash of justice!
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.
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
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."
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.
I worked in discovery. A lot of subpoenas still request microfiche and other formats that likely haven't been used in decades. Because there's that one clinic who still uses them who thinks "any and all records" must imply "except if you think of some convoluted exception"
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.
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.
In law such words are called terms of art - but most lawyers know them and there's no reason for their use to create incomprehensible documents. It's not like every other word is a term of art.
When I was I law school they taught us to write as clearly as possible and avoid legalese. Hopefully that catches on, I don't think legalese is good or necessary. Clarity is better
Really the main problem is trust and credibility, or lack thereof. Which necissitates all of these adaptations.
There’s a famous story of Warren Buffet buying Nebraska Furnitur Mart with no paperwork whatsoever, just some verbal assurances, a handshake, and a TV interview with the esteemed owner.
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.
https://catala-lang.org/
There was a book written about something like that in 1949. Well OK OK I'm half joking, since the book wasn't entirely about that!
But then a contract would never be able to describe modern day inventions, processes or procedures as deliverables lol
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.
> but I think many of them would enjoy it.
Many probably discovered it already, without realizing it has a name.
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.
Law and technical standards are two places where language must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.
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!
Oh… also detectives. My colleagues say I don’t interview users. They say I interrogate them.
Agreed. My point is that engineering documents read differently than legal documents, but have the same necessity for precision.
The article disagrees with your comment. They found that the plainer English laws would be no less enforceable.
Here's an example. Patent lawyers absolutely love the word "plurality", a very uncommon word in normal English. They mean "more than one", but why don't they say that? It's not only clearer but it's also less ambiguous (check the many definitions of "plurality").
It's because they are copying a rule without thinking about it. Other examples of that:
* "an historical occasion" - this is wrong, it's "a historical occasion", but people hear it and think it's some special rule
* Not using "I" in research papers, even with a single author! There's no rule that requires this but people think there is. I read a paper once that used "I". It was great.
I'm writing a nonfiction book about why people play a certain video game. It's been interesting to switch between 'I' for when I'm making a novel or specific point and 'we' when I need the first person but what I'm saying is the consensus point or common experience. I recommend the same in academic writing. I'm sure that this is a flamewar topic now that I think about it though, aha.
Agreed, I'm a proponent of using "we" in technical communication, because the "I" is not important and should not be emphasized. This goes against popular writing advice, but I don't think the advice is good.
I like to use words like "thus", "hence", and "therefore" a lot -- but this is because, as a mathematician, I picked up a style of writing that has been deeply influenced by the mathematics I learned.
For that matter, the first day I was in Great Britain, I noticed that the other Americans I met had British accents, and I noticed in the few hours talking with them, I was already picking up on the accent myself.
It's only natural to pick up the language and idioms of the cultures you happen to be immersed in!
(And this applies to Law and Engineering as much as anything else, too.)
I agree, but "thus", "hence" and "therefore" are fairly normal words. "Plurality" and the grammatical structures of lawyers are on another level.
I would say maths has its own issues with language accessibility, but they're a bit different from law. Probably the biggest problem is naming everything after people instead of coming up with meaningful names.
> ‘an historical occasion’ - this is wrong
There is nothing wrong with the use of ‘an’ before ‘history’ and the forms of that lemma. It is unusual, and perhaps pretentious or otherwise silly, but only in the same way as ‘connexion’ is an unusual (&c) but perfectly correct spelling.
It is one of the few things in language that definitely is wrong.
The point of saying "an" instead of "a" is to make it easier to say a following word that starts with a soft sound (there's probably a technical term).
"A igloo" is hard to say, so we change it to "An igloo" which is a lot easier.
"A history lesson" is not hard to say so there's no need for "an".
Have you ever said "an history lesson" or even heard anyone say that?
No. Of course not.
I would assume it has to do with the next word. You wouldn't say "a occasion", you say "an occasion" so then it's natural to say "an historical occasion" as well.
Not arguing correctness, just intuition.
"an historical" is because that's more fluid to pronounce, not because of a false rule.
The use of “an” with “history” is likely a holdover of its French origins where the h isn’t pronounced or from English dialects where the h isn’t pronounced. It’s essentially a learned behavior at this point. If it was used solely because of ease of pronunciation we’d expect also to see “an history”, “an high five”, “an hit record”.
But, in any case, for those who pronounce the h, “a historical” is easier to say.
In the case of lawyers I’d suspect tradition first and fear of typos reversing meaning (“ahistorical”) second.
So you would say "an history lesson"? No.
I say "an historical event" and I also say "a history lesson".
Precisely. That is incorrect because the purpose of "an" is to make the first part of a word easier to say, and "historical" and "history" start in exactly the same way.
You're only doing it because you've heard other people do it and you think there's some special rule for it. Maybe subconsciously even.
And don't say "you can't say something is wrong in language because prescriptivism Vs descriptivism etc."
Yes generally it is the case that language is defined by how it is used. This is an exception, where something has a very very clear purpose and usage, and you're doing it wrong.
I actually can't think of any clearer cases where the prescriptivists are right. It would have to be something so obvious you don't even think about it, like using spaces between words. Yet for some reason everyone messes up "a historical". It's as bizarre as if everyone omitted spaces before "historical" but not "history" or any other words.
Hah, ok.
The grammar police have yet to pull me over. I'll continue speaking as I do, thank you.
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.
Lawyers and hackers are very similar professions.
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.
Just being pedantic and curious here: I'm assuming you're using "lawyer" casually with a "language" qualifier, not authorised to give professional legal advice, or specialising in legal language nuances?
> specialising in legal language nuances?
Hackers (in the HN sense) also excel with programming language nuances.
(maligned)
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.
What about any sort of inspectors who try to find flaws in things, like e.g. buildings or otherwise?
See also theologians and philosophers (also good at finding loopholes in theories).
Despite your opening sentence, you didn't disagree with OP. "Courts" are a venue for other lawyers.
> 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." :)
I like to use the word "superstition" to describe my attempts to prevent migraines by wearing sunglasses, eating chocolate, and avoiding orange juice. I only have vague corollaries to believe these are helpful (particularly since I don't get migraines often, as awful as it is when I get hit by one), so it's not fair to attribute any of these with certainty -- but it's also not fair to dismiss them out of hand, either.
Sure, some "superstitions" are the result of random folklore, and can be ignored without consequence. (Knock on wood!) But others are the result of meme-ized facts, passed on via something that's folklorish and easy to remember to share.
Thus, it is fair to use the word "superstition" to describe something you think might be harmless, but may actually have serious consequences, if ignored, after all.
I'm pretty sure "superstition" was meant more weakly and "sometimes they are right" was meant more strongly than you're interpreting it.
It's irrational to think the awkward phrasing is actually better, but when you're being judged by other people sometimes they're going to enforce the bias.
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)
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.
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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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Congress can do this but chooses not to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On which end of Roe? The reasoning for the decision was sketchy, and Dobbs overthrew decades of case law.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes, laws would be very easy to write if we had consensus. Unfortunately, laws are useful primarily when we don't have consensus.
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.
> 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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a lot like C++, come to think of it.
>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.
Well to add to that, representing yourself is a really bad optics and you can't fervently defend yourselves. That's why even lawyers when put on trial will use other lawyers.
>Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia
Careful past that Chesterton fence
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.
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…
I am sorry but law is for every citizen who has to obey it, so it is for everyone and everyone have to understand not only lawyers, are you sure you know what you are saying?
There can be no lawyer at every time you do almost anything in life, be in traffic, raise children, participate in education, purchase something, travel, anything! Do you need an engineer sitting right next to you when you turn on the light or operate a vechicle? No! You need them for advanced things.
If you argue that ALL law have to be understood only by lawyers then you are very very lost! What you have to obey, you have to understand! At least the relevant part (nuclear waste storage is perhaps not for you, I am just guessing), but even knowing which part is relevant you need to understand! Not enough lawyers to sit next to everyone guiding through everyday life that is regulated by law!
It is difficult to understand because it made to sound ominous (fucked up for everyone), that's it, see the article. Form over essence. Also evolving without effort for restructuring so it becomes overcomplicated (see article). All formality over practicality and common sense, that's why it is so convoluted, or "it’s an accidental property", mimicing for centuries.
Also don't mix up everyday language here used with friends over a beer that could be vague for outsiders - or themselves - but there ARE ways to be specific and understood with ordinary people too using the generic communication method law uses too: language. That could been used, that is being used in other areas in communicating towards layman (like doctors, I mean the smart ones, not engulfing you with latin explaining your condition and prognosis, right? Also instruction manuals for complex gadgets are not in ancient greek just for the sake of it, right, but ordinary and specific or even formal language that are still being understood by the ordinary consumer, as that is important.)
Additionally: "Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.". I rest my case.
You don’t need a lawyer for simple things.
Everyone knows (sans lawyer) you can’t kill people, steal things, run red lights, commit fraud, lie in contracts, and so on.
Regarding your closing argument, what a wonderful argument against your point. Of course plain language contracts are just as enforceable as traditional ones. That is, you cannot argue, “your honor, this contract was written in plain language therefore it is not valid.”
But enforceability is a distinct concept from (really a subset of) defensibility. The problem with plain language is it tends to be less exhaustive and more ambiguous, which while enforceable (a valid contract with force of law) will be easier to wiggle out of in court.
To be clear, I understand your point and share your desire for this to be the case. Just having worked in a complex regulatory environment (health data), I don’t see it as even close to realistic, and it’s unrealistic for very good reasons.
If people really cared, law would have been written in Lojban. :P
Well, here's how you come to understand it. You take the time to read filings, and follow trials. Trust me, it works!
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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?
Half the politicians are lawyers, so it makes sense they'd want to protect their own interests.
The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary.
"(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!
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.
> 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.
I suspect most people never employ a lawyer, and most people don’t go around doing illegal things.
You can learn a lot by watching or asking others.
Your fear seems unfounded.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
"wild" is not defined as as "anyone who doesn't share your perspective".
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?
Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?
No, thats yet another cartel.
The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in.
And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
I'm not taking a position for or against the argument that law is code, but making the observation that it contradicts itself. Particularly in the case of the 2nd amendment. The bill of rights is supposed to be a limitation on government itself, so this isn't merely a matter of jurisdiction. In the state I reside in, I can put a loaded gun in my pocket and go about my daily business. In my birth state it would be a crime to conceal it without a permit, and in NYC it would be a 3-1/2 year minimum sentence (unless you're an NFL player [1] in which case you get a plea deal of 2 years, so somehow "mandatory minimum" changes it's meaning)
If I were to translate this into code, it would mean that variables that were constant will sometimes still change value. It would mean that operations on data would differ depending on the scope in which the operations were applied. And it would mean that certain variables that were closer to the base address (more money) would operate differently than variables stored in distant memory offsets [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxico_Burress#:~:text=On%2...)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_sentencing_of_Robe...
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...
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.
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.
There are literally 1.33 million lawyers in the US...
And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable.
Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs.
I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
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.
You think its mindboggling that some laws refer to other laws? Really??
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.
This is just dunning kruger effect
> 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.
> 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.
It seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
I'm watching the one where they gutted the Chevron decision because they don't want officials, nominated by the elected President, having sway over how regulations are enforced, and instead want judges (who have no real accountability past their confirmation by the Senate) to do that job instead, despite them not having any real expertise in many of the fields that the US federal government regulates.
That, to me, sounds a lot like a judiciary that wants to have things decided via the interpretation of legalese by a lawyer instead of by facts as determined by the present will of the people.
In US, we have a constitutional protection against bills of attainder.
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.
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
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-...
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...
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.
> 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)... -_-
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.
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).
'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.
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.
Yeah, I've given up on expecting to know what people will understand "next Wednesday" to mean. I either say "this coming Wednesday" or "next week on Wednesday". Problems solved.
Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."
If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."
> '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".
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.
> 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.
Yeah, I think the weekend nomenclature is definitely trickier.
> 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.
To my ear, this is wrong, but I think you're right that it's more common. I think 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' are fuzzier than 'this Tuesday' and 'next Tuesday' because of that misalignment I pointed to before, where 'the weekend' is thought of as a thing that comes at the end of a week, but how we write it most calendars where I live is as a thing that bookends the week on each side.
But I couldn't take up the usage you describe even if I moved to a region where it was predominant, I think. How could I abide a situation where 'this Saturday' occurs during 'next weekend'? That's simply madness. :D
(It's amazing how much we humans manage to communicate with something as messy as natural language-- perhaps especially amazing to programmer-brained people like me, who take some comfort and ease from the simplicity and neatness of the artificial formalisms we work with every day.)
i think the difference is the frequency with which it is necessary to differentiate "this" and "next".
for weekends, most of the time most people are talking in ways that make "this weekend" "the next weekend to occur". so here, "this" and "next" are effectively synonymous.
for days of the week, however, it is more often important to differentiate "this Thursday" (occuring in a couple of days from now, during this week) and "next thursday" (occuring in more than 7 days from now, as part of next week).
If my hunch is correct, it would make conventions highly dependent on social scheduling frequency in a culture.
And in reading your comment, I just realized there's a difference between casual conversation and writing something down.
I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'll put it in the calendar, the 8th it is!" and you reply with "No, I meant the 15th" -- and this reduces the ambiguity. This kind of thing would be happening in "real time", so being perfectly clear isn't as important.
However, if you write "next Wednesday" in a contract, and then complete it on the 15th instead of the 8th, and it's taken to Court ... it's a lot harder to figure out what the the original conversation was like, that led to the writing of the contract!
Hence, it makes sense to use as unambiguous language as possible when writing a contract.
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.
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).
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!
This is a great resource for UX design as well.
> 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
Wow TIL. Those before and afters are awesome and I have definitely seen this showing up in government documents. Thanks for sharing.
Am I crazy or does the guidelines page not contain the guidelines? https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/
Maybe because I’m on mobile?
The guidelines are hidden in the menu in the top-right on mobile.
[X] Good.
> 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.
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 (§3.14.159) unless working (§8.6.753) in a job (§127.0.1) 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
> 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.
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
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.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to say "English can get bent for having nuance" I was speaking about them from a legal point of view, and (again) I emphasize that based on your examples the difference matters solely in sentencing not "how illegal" they are
To circle back to the "if law were programming" idea, I think of all the nuances you cited as belonging in any "then" clauses, not the "if" clauses of legalese
because (as I ham-fistedly tried to get at) there are very, very few cases in the law where one human can legally end the life of another human so it's silly to try and split hairs about "why" except for how much revenge(?) society wants to extract from them for the wrongdoingLaw 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.
Yes, but that needs to be cleaned up!
I'd take out the reference to "job" -- because the only State violence where it's legal to commit violence against another person without provocation is in the Military (and even then, it's subject to Rules of Engagement and other protocols); whereas even though police have powers not normally exercised by other citizens to arrest people, both police and citizens have the right to respond to lethal force with lethal force, which can often (but not always -- "lethal" can mean severe maiming, for example, or an attempt to incapacitate) lead to the death of the person being responded to.
I would like to see general law subject to a restriction like that. But law that applies to specialized domains can be written such that anyone reasonably proficient in that domain can understand it.
> 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?
What should be done for the high-school freshman dropout who goes on to get a commercial driver's license, and then goes on to get an endorsement for transporting hazardous materials?
But murder and manslaughter aren't simply "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention", that's why we have different degrees of each. Because you have to define what intention means. Savagely beating somebody to death, while believing they'll probably survive - is that with intention or without? There's also other forms of homicide than just manslaughter and murder!
I think that's why these terms exist, because they become shorthand for longwinded definitions that may need to be very precise.
FWIW, judges in England (or maybe UK) have flip-flopped on this question as recently as in 2003. (See "R v G") That said maybe the problem is that the UK doesn't have different degrees of murder. But still.
Real life can be complicated and moral/legal questions can be hard to determine.
What you're describing sounds like Toki Pona, which ends up very ambiguous because of 120 word vocabulary. Still, here's a contract written in it:
https://jonathangabel.com/2012/lipu-lawa-pi-esun-kama/
I actually initially did load the Toki Pona wikipedia page because I (erroneously) thought TP was just a constrained version of English and not its own language. So, once I saw it was not one of the established natural languages that are used in law/contracts/treaties I closed the page
If we were going to get 80 year old Senators to learn a new language, I'd lobby for Lojban which is at least plausibly designed for representing unambiguous semantics
I've mentioned before that any laws that are written in formal languages seems great from the metric of keeping "interpretation" cases out of the judicial system but would put society back into the "priests read Latin and tell the plebs what God really meant, trustmebro" and that's for sure no bueno
I think you'd just end up going through the motions of this again: https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0
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.
https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala#readme is the most famous one I know of, and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catleg is an integration with the French legal code. https://catleg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli_reference.html#c... gives an example URL that has unfortunately link rotted but wayback has it https://web.archive.org/web/20240721045507/https://www.legif...
I am pretty sure there are several more but that's the one I can recall. It has been discussed here periodically https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/catalalang (and https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=catala-lang.org ) with the 2023 thread being the beefiest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546874
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.
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+....
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.
What's a "record date"? How is it significant? What other provisions use that term?
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The parallels are pretty superficial. The process is similar to theologians arguing scripture or maybe querying a low-grade LLM.
> 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.)
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
I think they were going for „giving legal advice while not being a lawyer“, not the suggestion of judge shopping.
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.
> to think that layperson could be jailed for suggesting it
Who told you forum shopping is illegal to talk about?
Giving legal advice when not being a lawyer is illegal, it’s probably very unlikely that this already counts as legal advice though.
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.
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.
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.
It reminds me of the pre-symbolic mathematical notations where equations would be described in long paragraphs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
I can't see agreement on intentions in writing, there will be many intentions.
What I would like to see is what harm it is supposed to prevent.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
That's what I've always thought.
Legalese looks an awful lot like code (I'm a programmer) meant to cover all edge cases and not permitting subroutines. It would be an awful lot clearer if they used a single term and then defined it after the main body of the law. Put as much as possible into a global appendix--as a layman occasionally trying to look up a law I find eternal references to as defined by xxxx.
And require the state to publish a version with hyperlinks and hover text.
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.
> "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.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b... because evidently the $(make DESTDIR= install) is just kidding
Or like the old quip: "Free as in speech, not free as in beer."
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.
Free Software predates Open Source, so that's not an ideal conflating.
I get where you are coming from though. The choice of the word "Free" in "Free Software" isn't ideal because the word "Free" has multiple meanings. Most people (especially non-tech users) assume it means "no cost" rather than "unencumbered".
So yes, it would have been simpler either a different name. Hindsight is perfect.
That said Free Software is different to Open Source (although lots of tech folk conflate the two.) That aside, it doesn't stop people adding their own (incorrect) requirements or expectations, as seen elsewhere in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
It's verbose english with a stubborn attitude against any kind of formatting. Maybe I'm part of the problem here. BRB.
Legalese would be a lot easier to understand if they did write it like an english programming language. “If age < 21 then let alcohol = illegal” is pretty succinct and unambiguous compared to however they actually wrote that statement in legalese.
And very often means or in English - recent Supreme Court case about this.
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.
>...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...
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I’m just curious. Did the writers of the Bill of Rights expect this sort of constant reinterpretation of the laws to suit modern cases that we see today? Or did they actually believe that the ink was dry so to speak?
> 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.
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.
Indeed. Some legalese is intentionally ambiguous, and sometimes that's good and sometimes that's no so good.
The Bill of Rights works?!
Elsewhere I have specifically used the 2nd amendment at an example of why simple laws don't work.
Are arms permitted to everyone or only to members of a militia? And it's a binary, no restrictions on what type of arms.
Look at current gun law vs the wording of the 2nd, how can you possibly relate the two?? (Although in some cases I can see other laws being relevant. There are things you can possess but neither store nor transport due to the rules around hazardous materials. Top of the list: Tannerite. You buy it as two separate containers, you're free to handle it as you choose. Once they're mixed it's a high explosive and subject to all the handling rules of high explosives. You can detonate it or you can destroy it, that's it. Also, high power amateur rocket motors. Lots of rules about storing and transporting them that are simply impossible for many users--think about what would happen in a fire.)
I don’t think that says anything about the bill of rights. If anything it strengthens ops point that piling on this language is seemingly done to generate confusion and maybe even to enable selective enforcement of certain prosecution, as we’ve seen with the Hunter Biden fiasco.
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
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.
> generally just a sentence or two
Plus various volumes worth of self contradicting case law and principles going back centuries before settlements were even made in the americas
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."
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"
> "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.
Spoken like someone who has never been "helped" by a government agency.
You've obviously never had the government show up at your door saying these words.
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?
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
This would not be the first time a whole section of the 14th amendment was just written out by the courts.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
> 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.
Thank you, I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger point of discussion. The whole methodology and the conclusions drawn are dubious at best. I guess most people didn't read the article!
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.
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
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".
Yeah. I'd like to see a system where a person or organization can put up say $100k, specify an act or series of acts and have it litigated as if it were real. There's no juries or the like as the "facts" are laid down at the start. You win, you get back your money and it becomes part of case law just as if it were real, including any compensation due innocent defendants. (Note that if the state is not required to defend it, they're free to immediately concede, return your money and admit the stated actions are legal.)
Where are you going to get an appropriate set of facts from, though? You're essentially proposing a legal thought experiment, but thought experiments are notorious for setting up unrealistic sets of facts to be based on - how often does a scenario exactly like the trolley problem arise, and is it even justified to extrapolate any moral conclusions from that to other scenarios? There is a legal saying - "hard cases make bad law". The temptation in your system would be to make hard cases, for the same reason hard cases are prevalent in ethical philosophy. The effect on the resulting law is predictable.
So you need to work essentially from cases that have gone through at least court case. That's called an appeal, and it already exists.
If the facts don't match reality you've gone to all the effort for nothing--people aren't going to do it. And if hard cases make bad law the legislature should do it's job and fix the law!
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?
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.
> 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.
Oops, I meant to say generally 'include', not list. I'll reword that.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was literally the case when we look at history surrounding Jim Crowe laws. They were purpose built to disenfranchise. You always have to wonder what the actual intent of a given law is. The incentive to work in an ulterior motive within the text is always going to be there. And we have not designed a system to be robust to that. Most we can do is attempt to pass yet another law that might rectify the “bad” one but that one itself might be filled with bullshit. Pork barrel politics is a real phenomenon and a side effect of our legal system.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's a possible solution.
But often FFIs pollute the reason one chooses to use obscure languages.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What look are you referring to? Computer Modern font? Most journals I work with (ACM related mostly) use something other than the default.
Its the forbidding look of well typeset equations and tables, not to mention the amazing tikz package :-)
Aaaaahhhh!! This document has hanging punctuation!! They must be using the `microtype` package!
> 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.
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.
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.
Where did I say technical documentation should explain what "files" are?
I think you misunderstood my point completely lol.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Surely, your claim would only apply to contracts or court decisions, but not to laws.
Hm, interesting thesis. You should post that as a toplevel comment.
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.
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?
Isn’t this common in other countries, where a “notary” has to sign contracts as well?
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.
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)
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.
>> 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.
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.
Yes, 100% - because as the "business owner" I've been the one responsible for actually passing the signed agreements back and forth, so I would have seen the notarization.
Strange.
Notaries exist to verify identity. If identity verification wasn’t an issue. They might not be necessary.
There are probably other ways of accomplishing the same thing.
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
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
Notaries are about proving you are the one who signed it, not about what is signed.
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> 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.
> “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...
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).
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.
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.
Not just contracts, this is a variation of an "aside" and I've seen it often enough in books that it's normal to me. I do it pretty regularly in comments here, too.
Any person or persons who tampers, alters, misrepresents, enhances, or otherwise knowingly $VERBs the $NOUN, $NOUNs, or other representations of $NOUN, shall be in violation pursuant to regulations §175.4 ($VERBing) and subject to penalties pursuant to §96.3 (hereinafter PENALTIES).
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.
It’s simple really.
Almost every software engineer strives to write code in a clear and concise manner. However, usually we produce a pile of spaghetti. Why is that? We all know why.
Now, take those reasons and imagine you’re in this situation:
You’re working on a codebase that has been around for 200+ years, you don’t fully understand the code you are editing, the requirements are somewhat vague (“i know it when i see it”), people calling the shots are demanding that you make ad-hoc exemptions for them for political reasons, the coding style guidelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and worst of all you cant compile the code and test whether it works, so you dry-run the scenarios in your head and hope you don’t miss any weird test cases.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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?
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...
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.
it seems you have submitted twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42438850
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.
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.
At least on a quick reading, the study overlooks the adversarial nature of legal drafting. Laws and contracts are optimized to be quick to write while avoiding the constructions that are easy to attack. Put differently, it’s often an attempt to write defensively while being lazy.
Center embedding—embedding a definition of a subject or object in the middle of a sentence—is hard to read but makes it harder to argue that a particular definition doesn’t apply to a particular sentence. For many hard to read constructions, you can probably achieve the same result in a way that’s easier to read while being just as hard to attack, but that might take more analysis during the writing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not a good example of legalese.
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.
"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."
This tendency toward "center-embedding" seems similar to the tendency of developers to use long function names with embedded descriptions. I find these names highly distracting and oftentimes cryptic. Not being a "developer", I would rather names be short, e.g., like Arthur Whitney makes them, so the code fits better on the page. Then, if necessary, place the descriptions of each function in a separate section or file. Meanwhile I have learned to tolerate developer tendencies.
I like looking things up. Legal documents frequently have definitions in a separate section. In order to read a document it is necessary to refer to the definitions section. I have found that many businesspeople struggle with defined terms in legal documents. They often ignore that terms may be defined and fail to appreciate the siginifcance of the definitions.
From the article:
>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.
>To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.
It's not clear from the description of the findings that the language participants used was to borrow authority ("magic incantation hypothesis"). In fact, any number of other conclusions could be reached.
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.
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.
Here's a draft of the actual paper: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publica...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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...
Well, if you understand legislative language like me, they really aren't.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
As described, the research sounds weak. They have a hypothesis: "laws are written that way due to style imitation." And their proof of that hypnosis is to weakly reject an entirely different hypothesis "the magic spell hypothesis."
Poor sloppy work. As likely to misleading as clarify.
My favorite summary of this MIT press release us this three-word quote by the author: “we think maybe…”.
Center embedding = lexical scoping for clauses which need to withstand adversarial interpretations.
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.
So like C++?
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.
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.
One reason why legalese is so incomprehensible is because it has to cover all conceivable edge and corner cases explicitly. It rubs up against the limits of human language.
I think here's where LLM can shine. Do you think that having LLM to digest and translate the incomprehensible laws will help people to understand them better?
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-...
Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
I always thought it was because it needed to be rigid and specific.
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.
One reason for the style is established meaning for phrases. Lawyers have phraseology that has very specific meaning in the context.
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.
In the future only advanced intelligence will understand the api governing human - computer - human - animal - human interactions.
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.
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.
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.
How is it much different from RFCs?
It keeps the legal industry in business, at least until GPT came along.
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.
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
> I'm sure exactly zero of them will stand up in court.
How is this any different than any other Sovereign Citizen legal argument?
Is there any reason to think the legal industry has been automated and is no longer "in business"?
Ironic that a cryptic study says what we already knew
Bureaucracy + poetry = "bureauetry"
An AI that understands legal text and can reliably answer questions about it will rake in billions.
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.
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.
Section 1. Definitions (a) "Pedestrian" shall mean any natural person afoot or using a means of conveyance propelled by human power other than a bicycle, including but not limited to rollerskates, skateboards, or similar devices, or who is operating a wheelchair or other mobility device. (b) "Roadway" shall mean that portion of any street, highway, or other public thoroughfare improved, designed, or ordinarily used for vehicular travel. (c) "Crosswalk" shall mean: (1) That portion of a roadway distinctly indicated for pedestrian crossing by lines or other markings on the surface; or (2) In the absence of such markings, that portion of a roadway included within the prolongation or connection of the boundary lines of the adjacent sidewalk at intersections. (d) "Jaywalking" shall mean any unauthorized crossing of a roadway by a pedestrian, including but not limited to crossing at a location other than a crosswalk where such a crosswalk is provided, or crossing at a time or in a manner contrary to posted traffic control signals or lawful instructions of a peace officer or traffic control device. Section 2. Prohibition (a) It shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross any roadway at any point other than within a marked or unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, except as otherwise expressly authorized by law. (b) Where traffic control signals are in operation, it shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross a roadway against such signals or contrary to the instructions of any authorized traffic control device or peace officer. Section 3. Exceptions Notwithstanding Section 2, the prohibitions set forth herein shall not apply to: (a) Any pedestrian acting in compliance with the lawful order, signal, or direction of a peace officer or other authorized official. (b) Any pedestrian who, due to an emergency or hazard, must cross at a point other than a designated crosswalk to avoid imminent harm, provided such crossing is effected with reasonable care and caution. Section 4. Penalties Any person found to be in violation of this ordinance shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than [Amount] per offense, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction. Nothing herein shall preclude the imposition of additional sanctions as provided by law or the exercise of discretion by the issuing authority in accordance with applicable statutes and regulations. Section 5. Severability If any provision of this ordinance, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, shall be deemed invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, such invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this ordinance, which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this ordinance are hereby declared severable. Section 6. Effective Date This ordinance shall take effect on [Effective Date], and all acts or omissions occurring on or after such date shall be subject to its terms.
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SECTION 1. DEFINISHUNS ‘N DAT (a) "Pedestrian" be meanin’ any geezer on foot or rollin’ on them mad skates, blades, boards, or in a chair what goes slow, innit. (b) "Roadway" be that big bit o’ street where dem cars be cruisin’, not the sidewalk where you can chill wit’ your crew. (c) "Crosswalk" be them stripey bits what you see painted on da road, so peeps know where to cross like good boys ‘n girls. SECTION 2. NO DODGY CROSSIN’ (a) Hear dis: You is well not allowed to stroll, swagger, or roll across da street anywhere except those official crossin’ zones, ya get me? Don’t be thinkin’ you can just hop in front of them ridez wherever you want, aight? (b) If there’s lights flashin’ “Don’t Walk,” or a copper tellin’ you “Oi, stay put,” you best do what they say, ‘cos you ain’t special. Ignore ‘em, and you is well outta order. SECTION 3. EXCEPTIONS N’ STUFF (a) If a proper rozzer or traffic geezer says “Go,” then you can go, blud. Proper authoritay, innit. (b) If da place is on fire, zombies is about, or summin’ else mad dangerous is goin’ down, you can cross outside da lines if dat’s the only way to save ya pretty face. Use your noggin, yeah? SECTION 4. PUNISHMENT, BLUD If we catch you playin’ chicken with da traffic and doin’ da jaywalk bizness, you gonna get slapped wiv a fine (cash money, innit). How much dough you owe depends on what da big men in robes say, so don’t get cheecky. You pay up, show respeck, and walk off like a proper geezer next time. SECTION 5. SEVERABILITEY (BIG WORD, INNIT) If da judge says some bit of dis law is off its rocker, da rest still stands tall, bruv. No wigglin’ out just ‘cos one bit is messed up. SECTION 6. WHEN IT KICKS IN When we say so, you better watch dem feet. No mo’ crossin’ streets all willy-nilly. Safe? Safe.
*WITCHES’ DECREE AGAINST UNLAWFUL ROADWAY PASSAGE (AS HEREINAFTER SET FORTH)*
First Witch (intoning): Thrice the blind crow caws at night, Thrice the lantern’s waning light, Thrice again, and so we say, A binding writ we cast this day.
Second Witch (proclaiming): By yew and ash, and roadside charm, By wheel of cart and horse’s alarm, No mortal foot shall traverse the thoroughfare Except at Proper Pedestrian Passages, duly designated therein and thereto, Whereat painted lines, or lawful signals, Shall serve as solemn guide and direction.
Third Witch (forewarning): Should any soul, notwithstanding these provisions, Cross the roadway other than as herein provided, Or disregard such authorized signals or official commands, Said soul shall be subject to assessment of a pecuniary forfeiture, Herewith imposed and enforceable by the sovereign’s agents, Until due satisfaction of all fines and penalties be rendered.
All Witches (in chorus, concluding): Double, double, heed and trouble; Behold this decree that none shall rebuttle. In witness whereof, we sisters three, Have set our seal upon this fee: Any who transgress this law be warned, Within these words their fates be formed.
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*Avast! The Anti-Jaywalkin’ Articles*
*Article the First (Definitions):* (a) “Pedestrian,” says ye, be any swabbie wanderin’ on foot or rollin’ along in some contraption not be driven by the wind nor the fire in the belly of a mighty engine. (b) “Roadway,” ye scurvy knaves, be that stretch o’ land claimed by wagons, coaches, and other wheeled beasts o’ burden, not meant fer yer careless trot about. (c) “Crosswalk,” be them stripes on the deck of the street, showin’ where honest folk cross without fear o’ keelhaul or lash.
*Article the Second (Prohibitions):* (a) Let it be known to all ye landlubbers: ‘Tis forbidden to cross the roadway at any point save that which be designated by the stripes or markers. Ye do not scurry before the carriages and coaches like a rat on a spar! (b) Should there be signals or lights givin’ order to halt or proceed, ye must heed ‘em like the captain’s command. Defy ‘em, and ye be walkin’ the plank into the arms o’ the law!
*Article the Third (Exceptions and Pardons):* (a) If an officer o’ the King or a lawful master-at-arms waves ye across, then by the beard of Blackbeard, ye may cross forthwith, no penalty clingin’ to yer breeches. (b) If a dire emergency forces yer hand—fire upon the docks, or beasts run amok—ye may cross where ye must, provided ye don’t toss caution to the wind, lest ye be crushed under wheel or hoof.
*Article the Fourth (Penalties and Booty):* Any scallywag who dares cross outside them stripes or disobeys them signals shall face a fine, a forfeit o’ coin, set by the courts of the Crown. Pay ye must, or swing in the rigging of the king’s justice! Yarr!
*Article the Fifth (Severability):* If some learned barrister finds a hitch in one line o’ this here law, fear not. The rest of the Articles stand as tall as a mainsail in a gale, remainin’ firm and unbroken.
*Article the Sixth (When the Edict Takes Hold):* From the day the Crown’s seal is fixed, this law be in full force. So mind yer step, ye scurvy dogs, and cross at the proper marks lest ye taste the lash of justice!
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
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.
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
unwillingness to use parens
scheme is the true legalese
I always thought it was because of narcissism. I didn't see it as casting an authority spell over others.
See also: Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
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."