[deleted]
Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#12In general, the documented precedent cases are used to develop a consensus by legal crowds. In many places "jury nullification" can theoretically supersede the courts judgement, but will likely get you kicked from the pool if you know such things exist. This is also why many punitive laws survive, simply by settling out of court via plea deals to avoid direct community/jury input. Citizens are still in charge, but decades of media often convinced people due process was somehow a bad thing (Socrates would be disappointed).
As a side note, if you are not using a legal rep, than expect people to make a bureaucracy more painful. Talk to a lawyer before you try to talk with anyone else, as you may be initially innocent.. but say/do something contradictory that still lands you in trouble. I also advise against doing your own dentistry as well. ;-)
It would be cool to have a law database effort which focuses on building something accessible that makes lawyers lives easier, and provides a tax free donation link to a nonprofit organization. Perhaps some sort of curated wiki style journal site with a validated legal comment section.
I like my lawyers and commercial accountants, as they were the best investment one could make for a business. =)
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#13Looks good, sending it over to legal team at my company
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#14Impressive and really readable. I feel this would benefit from a slightly different name such as International Common Law Dictionary or something similar instead of the general term used now. I believe that many concepts found in common law just don’t translate to other law systems (let’s say Sweden, Spain, Germany) and a translation of the words (which would help in terms of understanding) actually doesn’t do the co…
> a slightly different name such as International Common Law Dictionary
That's a good idea. The generic name I'm using doesn't really describe it well.
And yes — it'll be really interesting to see what happens when I try to add Civil Law info. I mean, do they even explain the law over there? It's a whole other country. I kid, I kid. These will also be non-English, so that's another dimension of complexity.
Your thought about concepts not existing is a good one. Maybe a deft use of subject tags will help. I'm not convinced that LoC Subject Headings is the right choice, but they should handle anything under the sun. And they'll enable visitors to understand and filter the scope of the info.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#15Great work! If relying only on government sources is not a pre-requisite, you could also consider this site for glossary of terms under Indian laws (https://nyaaya.org/glossary/). I am not associated with them, but they do incredible work in providing digital, accessible legal information to the general public. And they make it available under creative commons license.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, thanks for the perspective from the across the water. I'm already surprised to learn how similar the concepts are (still) across all the common law countries. Even, say, between the U.S. and New Zealand. I was also surprised to find out how easy Canada's sites are to parse, which is why there are so many Canadian sources in the dataset. They're on top of their game with compliant and uniform web apps. And yep, I…
> I'm already surprised to learn how similar the concepts are (still) across all the common law countries. We can blame the Roman's and, in no small part, William Garrow for all that .. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Garrow Despite concepts in common there can still remain the complaint of Shaw (and later Wilde) that we are divided by a common language. Readability is good, at some point in any legal proce…
Thanks! Interesting info. For sure, I agree that vocabulary is important, and specialized words are extremely valuable. On the other hand, I'm intrigued by professionally written dictionaries that use a simplified English of a few thousand words in the definitions. Then, of course, sentence length and structure also come into play.
BTW, the Dale-Chall formula uses two factors to score readability: (1) Average sentence length (longer is worse), and (2) percent of "difficult" words. They've done scientific validation of this small and easy set of metrics. (See The New Dale-Chall Formula.) To determine whether a word is "difficult", they created a list of 3,000 "easy" words that 80% of 4th graders know. (It was developed to help design textbooks for children.) It's an interesting algorithm which is an easy-to-implement proxy for deeper linguistic analysis.
I've found that this very simple algorithm does a decent job of putting the easiest-to-grok definitions at the top. Meanwhile, sentences with parentheticals, lots of prepositions and passive voice are rated less readable and pushed towards the bottom of the page.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#17Great work! If relying only on government sources is not a pre-requisite, you could also consider this site for glossary of terms under Indian laws ( https://nyaaya.org/glossary/ ). I am not associated with them, but they do incredible work in providing digital, accessible legal information to the general public. And they make it available under creative commons license.
Thank you! That's a really good glossary. Beautiful plain English. But yeah, so far I'm relying on government texts, and statutes (actual laws) if possible. Mostly to increase confidence in the resource. But also to not worry about copyright issues.
By the way, if you find any English-language Indian glossaries published by the government, I'd be very interested. I've done some searching.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm already surprised to learn how similar the concepts are (still) across all the common law countries. We can blame the Roman's and, in no small part, William Garrow for all that .. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Garrow Despite concepts in common there can still remain the complaint of Shaw (and later Wilde) that we are divided by a common language. Readability is good, at some point in any legal proce…
Thanks! Interesting info. For sure, I agree that vocabulary is important, and specialized words are extremely valuable. On the other hand, I'm intrigued by professionally written dictionaries that use a simplified English of a few thousand words in the definitions. Then, of course, sentence length and structure also come into play. BTW, the Dale-Chall formula uses two factors to score readability: (1) Average sentenc…
Conversationally, in a beer over a barbie kind of way, no offence intended,
Dale-Chell lost me at "words that 80% of fourth-graders in American schools knew in 1948 (revised 1984)".
A cookie in 1984 is not the cookie of the 2020s web savvy teenager.
This particular article from the UK shares many of my own feelings about automated readability indexes:
https://www.effortmark.co.uk/readability-formulas-seven-reas...
I still admire your goal here, I'm simply suggesting to rely on a modicum of actual human feedback over automation where possible.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#19Great work! If relying only on government sources is not a pre-requisite, you could also consider this site for glossary of terms under Indian laws ( https://nyaaya.org/glossary/ ). I am not associated with them, but they do incredible work in providing digital, accessible legal information to the general public. And they make it available under creative commons license.
Thank you! That's a really good glossary. Beautiful plain English. But yeah, so far I'm relying on government texts, and statutes (actual laws) if possible. Mostly to increase confidence in the resource. But also to not worry about copyright issues. By the way, if you find any English-language Indian glossaries published by the government, I'd be very interested. I've done some searching.
Okay- so all of the legislations and government notifications by the central/federal government are now officially published only in digital form and are available on this website (https://egazette.nic.in/).
For your purposes, (a dictionary of key terms, unfortunately there is no government publication. However, one good hack you can consider is to look at the Section 3 of the General Clauses Act, 1897. The terms defined under this Act will govern the meaning in all the central/federal legislations and rules unless those legislations specifically define these terms. The terms defined under General Clauses Act include terms such as affidavit, immovable property, person etc. (essentially terms similar to the ones used in your dictionary). Here is the link; hope you find it useful (https://www.indiacode.nic.in/show-data?actid=AC_CEN_3_20_000...)
p.s.- https://www.indiacode.nic.in is also a government website where you can find copies of legislations and rules.
Re: Show HN: International Legal Dictionary
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! That's a really good glossary. Beautiful plain English. But yeah, so far I'm relying on government texts, and statutes (actual laws) if possible. Mostly to increase confidence in the resource. But also to not worry about copyright issues. By the way, if you find any English-language Indian glossaries published by the government, I'd be very interested. I've done some searching.
Okay- so all of the legislations and government notifications by the central/federal government are now officially published only in digital form and are available on this website ( https://egazette.nic.in/ ). For your purposes, (a dictionary of key terms, unfortunately there is no government publication. However, one good hack you can consider is to look at the Section 3 of the General Clauses Act, 1897. The terms d…
That Section 3 is fantastic. Thank you. I actually prefer definitions directly from statutes, because they're actual law and the copyright situation is better too. Are you generally familiar with Indian law? And a Python programmer? :-)