Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

sciencedirect.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 337 posts

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#71

Post by johndhi »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #65
pdonis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. This doesn't make sense. The parties to the contract are presumably laypeople, and they have to understand it before they agree to it and sign it since one of the legal requirements for a valid contract is a meeting of the minds, meaning a common understanding between the parties of what each of them is agre…

IANAL, How would you prove that? I think there are protected classes for that reason, but if some adult outside of such classifications signs they could ostensibly renege at any point under the pretense that they didn't understand, conversely I presume it would necessitate attorneys (or similar) at every contract signing to ensure it would be binding.

Your question is exactly the reason why meeting of the minds doesn't solve this problem. It's subjective.

Fyi in practice, signing the document means that you understand it, as far as a court is concerned. Contracts will often throw in boiler plate like "I am authorized to sign this, I've read it, and I understand and agree to it."

The most common way it's successfully challenged is "incompetence" - by showing the person who signed it in no way could have possibly understood it (e.g. developmentally disabled, someone held a gun to their head, don't speak the language and the translation was fraudulent, etc).

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#72

Post by Quarrel »

johndhi wrote: post #37
Quarrel wrote: post #28

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…

I tend to disagree. US law does require "plain language" in certain places (privacy policies for example) and that doesn't help. Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their legal requirements are harder to decipher.

Yeah, the EU one can be quite an issue.

Often the EU "principle" that is then enshrined in individual country's laws is fairly straight forward. However, you really need to understand the individual country and their regulator to understand their take on it and enforcement. There can be a huge disparity between countries, despite all being rooted in the same principle.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#73

Post by max51 »

At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new version to see if we need to implement anything new in our software.

For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To calculates something (eg. a specific wind load or seismic load), you just read the section from top to bottom and follow the recipe. Things are actually placed in the order that an engineer would use them.

With the US code, you have to deal with triple negations and 80% of the usefully information is presented as references to other sections. It's really not fun trying to understand it when a single sentence will link you to 8 paragraphs, 6 of which are in a completely different chapters or sub-chapters. And as you can imagine, these 8 paragraphs will also have their own references to other part of the code. It's a complete mess that is impossible to follow unless you write your own summary and/or take screenshots and rearrange them in order.

You end up with a situation where even experienced engineers can't understand it and have to rely on notes from colleagues, college textbooks, calculation examples, or they just blindly follow the design software they bought.

Working the support line for a high end structural analysis and design software has really opened my as to how incompetent and lazy a lot of the senior engineer from highly reputable firm can be. It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#74

Post by bradleyjg »

As a general matter writers that try to use a formal voice but don’t have a lot of practice with it produce writing that is much worse than if they just settled for something more casual.

I’m not saying emojis and text-speak but most of the time writers shouldn’t reach for words or phases that they think sound impressive.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#76

Post by randcraw »

Poor writing is the main cause for the illegibility of referreed science and engineering articles too. Historically this was partly due to publishers' demand that the article be quite short (often In addition to a format guide, every journal should specify a style guide (like the NY Times does), so the reader can expect a highly structured layout AND argument. (Explanatory content can go in 1+ supplement docs.) I'd even like to see standards for the use of emphasis (like bold, italics, colored text), especially for first mention of term/names that occur repeatedly.

The sooner we can make all professional writing trivial to skim, the better.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#77

Post by johndhi »

BurningFrog wrote: post #66
paulryanrogers wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything of significance without first having a lawyer vet the EULA? Such agreements are already absurdly long for some of the most trivial services or products. The answer cannot become "be a lawyer or rich enough to afford retaining one".

There is no such hope, and that is the answer. Much of this country is set up by and for lawyers, and that has consequences.

Agree. There is generally little hope of a layperson (or even a lawyer typically) of benefitting from a EULA. That said, laws separate from the contract might benefit you - if Microsoft's software kills your dog, you probably can't recover under the contract, but you might be able to win a lawsuit against them for breaking the law.

Unfortunately that process is also costly and benefits greatly from lawyer involvement. It's a widely known problem that it's expensive to navigate the court system.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#78

Post by westurner »

Which attributes of a person are necessary to answer a legal question?

Python:

  def has_legal_right(person: dict, right: str): -> bool
      assert person
      assert right
      #
      return NotImplementedError

  def have_equal_rights(persons: list): -> bool
      return NotImplementedError
Javascript:

  function hasRight(person, right) {
      console.assert(person);
      console.assert(right);
      // return true || false;
  }

  function haveEqualRights(persons) {
      // return true || false;
  }
Maybe Lean Mathlib or Coq?

... Therefore you've failed at the Law of Reciprocity.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#79

Post by dctoedt »

gumby wrote: post #18

TBF those structures do exist for a reason. Just take the “Total Compensation” as an example. Breaking it out as shown in the paper does work, but now some language is repeated; in an edit (and most contracts are edited rather than being created de novo ) one of the duplicated clauses could be edited and the other overlooked, especially if they become separated by successive edits. I’m sure there are obscurantist

The inconsistent-edits problem is a real one; failure to follow D.R.Y. cost a Dallas lender $693K because a guaranteed repayment amount was written as "one million seven thousand dollars ($1,700,000)" and words take precedence over numbers, so the lender was repaid $1.07 million and not $1.7 million.

In another example, the agreed deadline for a party to cure a breach of contract was written as "fifteen (30) days"; the breaching party cured before day 30 but after day 15 — which was too late, because the other party had already terminated the contract, and the court agreed that words take precedence over numbers.

So D.R.Y. is a sound guideline to follow in contracts (within limits; it's not an absolute, ironclad rule).

More: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#80

Post by AlbertCory »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #57
Quarrel wrote: post #28

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…

American patents are written in a language that isn't English. It's very precise if you can learn to read it, though. The same seems to hold for contracts, but to a lesser degree.

Usually when people say this, they mean the claims. The specification, which most engineers read, are not constrained by legal precedent.
Post reply on HN