41–50 of 337 posts
The sheer verbosity of the average person on the internet has always amazed me. You can't say anything in less than 3 solid paragraphs. Sometimes I wonder if the problem is mine. It certainly seems a hinderance to communication.
If it's true that most in-person communication is non-verbal, I wonder if people then try to over-compensate with their prose.
Maybe technical documents need more emoticons.
Why can't they just use normal English language for contracts? How did it get to be this way?
In looking at the human interaction space and regulating it, they're sort of trying to verbally describe the output of the Mandelbrot set while maintaining a coherent enough structure that it can be understood at a linguistic level by others. The closer they get to the ground truth the more complex things get in the explanations. And everybody doing this has gone down a specialized rabbithole, they have familiarity with a lineage of particular language that describes, fairly concisely, a known-good model for some contour in the set.
At least that's what I get from it in the scientific domain. Like if I rambled this shit off to the general public - and maybe here - they wouldn't know what I was saying. What's a confidence interval, what's a Mandelbrot set, what implications does it have in the context, what do I mean by model..?
Moreover the systems being scrutinized are based on precedence. Science works its way up to law, and court precedence sets the bar for future interpretations, including the structure of contracts - but also informally by understanding the grey areas in application, like what you can propose to people ignorant of the law that wouldn't be upheld by courts. So the specialist lineages are allowed to proliferate and remodel, I think it's something that simply comes as a product of persistent structures in... Any human endeavor. I'm no coder, but I've heard many times of horrifying outmoded codebases continuing forward, it's an artifact of systemic inertia and optimization around a nucleus of enduring legacy.
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>The top comment in this other HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32888730 I don't get it. That post is great. The lead is at the top. It's highly visible and you don't need to read anything else if you don't want to. The rest is just a long form explanation of why they like physical books.
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> But legal frameworks don’t cover individual situations, they paint broad strokes over the human experience. If that doesn't cohere with the questions individuals exploring the law actually have, maybe that isn't a good way for legal frameworks to be designed?
This is a very complicated proposal you've made but I think the main answer is, it isn't scalable for policymakers or even courts to consider everyone's individual situation a priori. It would cost too much money.
I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…
> Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter, Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch agencies to use plain language in any official document they produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contr…
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25...
I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…
> Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter, Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch agencies to use plain language in any official document they produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contr…
I am a lawyer who works with but doesn't do a MASSIVE amount of contract writing like some. I don't think "poor writing" is the right phrasing here, which implies ignorance or ineptitude. I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. We all know no one reads these, so we write them to future lawyers and courts who might want to get our clients in trouble.…
> I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. That's partly true — but there's no reason a contract can't be written to be understandable by mere mortals. (I do a lot of contract drafting and have been teaching it to 3Ls for years.)
Let me ask you this, though: why shouldn't I be a L.O.A.D.?
Also, who's the L.O.A.D. when I and a counterparty are editing a contract someone else drafted a template for five years ago? Am I expected to use my negotiating 'gun powder' to fix clarity issues?
Ultimately, the ethical responsibility is to choose the best client representation over the most readable contract, right? Those don't always overlap, do they?
> The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the residence homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on the homestead.
I have an Ivy League education and I still could hardly understand it, and I still think some of the language is ambiguous (i.e. I think "the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount" can be interpreted both ways).
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/03/25/the-lang...
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> Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter, Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch agencies to use plain language in any official document they produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contr…
I feel like this happens in Canada too because federal (and lots but not all provincial (“state”)) law/websites/guides has to be bilingual and they’ll have equal force. If the translations don’t mean exactly the same thing, hilarity ensues! https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25...
To simplify contract language, the biggest bang for the buck comes from SSSP: Short, Single-Subject Paragraphs, which are much easier to read; to review and revise during contract negotiations; and to reuse in other contracts.
(It's not unlike modularity and orthogonality in software.)
For more ranting on that subject — with some pathological before-and-after examples — see my online course materials (this version isn't pretty; I'm almost done refactoring it). [1]
[0] https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-08-28
[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...