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

131–140 of 337 posts

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

#131

Post by pdonis »

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.

> How would you prove that?

You don't. Once you sign a written contract, the presumption is that there was a successful meeting of the minds between the parties. If you later want to claim that you didn't have a meeting of the minds with the other party, the burden of proof is on you to show that. The other party does not have to prove that you did understand the contract.

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

#132

Post by meowkit »

actionablefiber wrote: post #95
_raoulcousins wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that I was about to comment "it doesn't seem so bad, just draw a directed graph to work it out". Reading your comment it does seem a little unreasonable.

No ballot initiative should require back-of-the-napkin syntactic analysis to understand.

A normative statement - which I declare to point out that you could also share what should be the case.

What might be more helpful is that ballot initiatives should have a stricter template based on type. If you're changing tax code it could be:

- Initiative Type: Taxes

- Affects: The homesteads of elders in X, Y, for Z

- Results: Taxes are raised

- Description: As stated above

- Definitions: Homesteads - X, Elders - Y, ad valorem - etc

Of course this is essentially making the same conclusions as the title which is that standard writing/legalese is really no longer acceptable given the complexity of many modern laws and incentivized parties.

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

#133

Post by pdonis »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #62
johndhi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters and readers of significance are almost always lawyers. If you decide to try to bring a claim against your mortgage lender, will you have a lawyer read your mortgage agreement before you file suit? Surely.

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".

> Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything of significance without first having a lawyer vet the EULA?

I think this focuses attention on the wrong thing.

A counterparty that is acting in good faith will not put absurdly long legalese in a contract, because if they are acting in good faith, it is in their interest to reach a genuine meeting of the minds with you, because fulfilling the contract will benefit both of you.

So the first question to ask is, is your counterparty acting in good faith? Are they genuinely trying to reach a win-win agreement with you, where both sides benefit? Or are they just trying to get whatever they can out of you, by hook or by crook, without caring whether you benefit?

If the answer to that is the latter, your best option is to avoid dealing with that counterparty at all. If a counterparty is not acting in good faith, no amount of legal analysis of contract language can protect you. (And that is why I avoid using products and services that have those absurdly long EULAs whenever possible.) And if a counterparty is acting in good faith, you should be able to reach agreement on reasonably simple contract language that a lay person can understand.

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

#134

Post by behaveEc0n00 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > 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 pu…

When you can just point at a law degree as unfalsifiable proof a contract must be legit what is the layman to do?

It could be argued the reason the law is successful (like many other “successful” social frameworks in history) is the ignorance of the masses.

High minded gossip, hyping story of forever human life and expansion is a human tradition.

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

#135

Post by torstenvl »

kemitchell wrote: post #112
torstenvl wrote: post #103

Consider the following two function definitions: int add(int a, int b) { return a + b; } int add(int a, int b) { if ((a > 0 && b > 0) && (INT_MAX - a b)) { return INT_MAX + (b - (INT_MIN - a - 1)); } else { return a + b; } } Which one expresses the intent more simply and understandably? Which one is more robust? Which one would you bet the future of your company on? I offer that, sometimes, simplicity of expression i…

Don't let lawyers confuse form and substance as cover. It's perfectly possible to address more possibilities in simple language. The result might run longer, but it won't hurt to read. Too many companies run on legal docs execs don't read. Too may lawyers write those docs to put readers off. If you want robust legal work for your company, maximize accountability for your legal advisers. All the usual tools.

Sure. Key word is "sometimes." I'm definitely in favor of simpler language when possible, and I think we once spoke about my minimalist ISC variant license.

But... we as a profession are still doing way better than past generations and their English/Middle French/Latin code-switching, talking about beasts feræ naturæ like poor reynard, with his depredations on farmers and on barn yards.

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

#136

Post by Victerius »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > 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 pu…

> I have an Ivy League education and I still could hardly understand it

Downvote for arrogance. An Ivy League education doesn't mean you're smarter.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

bluechair wrote: post #117
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > 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 pu…

I've rewritten the clause by moving "prepositional phrases" into the noun phrases to avoid as much nesting as possible. For example, instead of saying "the husband of the woman, I'd replace it with the woman's husband." Here's what I think it says: "This constitutional amendment authorizes the legislature to set the ad valorem taxes total reduction amounts that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary publ…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by _ggwa »

rozab wrote: post #127
_ggwa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a patent examiner and I can't agree with "It's very precise if you can learn to read it". A large fraction of patent applications I've worked on are unclear. I even wrote a linter to help catch some problems. (DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.) Edit: I will agree that patent claims can be precise, but so can normal English. I think pate…

Wow, this is fascinating. Do you know how many examiners are using this tool? Why did you choose to make the default configuration more nitpicky than yourself, and is this the config you use when running the tool?

I'm not aware of any other examiners who use this tool. I did ask an examiner I know to try it and they did, but they didn't find it useful. They suggested that the warnings that plint returns are more relevant to the areas I examine than what they examine, which is fair. They also found my syntax for antecedent basis checking to be confusing.

The personal reason why I made it nitpicky is that there's a huge variability between examiners in terms of which rejections to make. I'm a junior examiner, so everything I do has to be approved by someone else. They might tell me to remove a certain rejection because they don't have a problem with that, and to add some other rejections for things they care about. In my view, it would be better to get a wide range of possible rejections upfront and then think about which ones the person signing off on the office action cares about. The alternative is going back and forth about which rejections to do, which would take more time.

The JSON configuration file I use filters out a bunch of the rules because the person who signs my office actions right now doesn't care about those ones, or I don't care about those ones. I need to update the README file to say that.

Also, an attorney writing a patent application has much less information about which rejections are likely than I do. So from the perspective of an attorney, I think being nitpicky makes sense too. Not that I'm aware of any attorneys who use plint.

plint might not even be nitpicky enough. Recently r/patentexaminer had a poll [0] where about 6% of examiners said that the term "at least one" was indefinite... which is astounding to me as I think that's totally fine from a definiteness standpoint. As I recall, I have some warnings in my linter for enablement on that in case it's not clear how having two or more of something would work if only one is disclosed. But usually "at least one" is fine from an enablement perspective.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/xfvsrs/at_l...

(Again, my posts here are only my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)

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

#139

Post by Spooky23 »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #108
actionablefiber wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ballot initiative should require back-of-the-napkin syntactic analysis to understand.

They were deliberately torturing themselves to avoid saying "raise taxes." What they seem to be saying, if I parsed it correctly: "We now get to include tax breaks from the previous year as a factor in property value when taxing the elderly." That seems awful. I kind of get the hyper-technicality they're going for, but it still seems like they're sticking it to seniors... again, if I understood it correctly.

These issues are nuanced. Texas municipalities depend on property taxes more than most as there’s no state income tax.

One thing local government politicians love to do is pass tax exemptions for old people, disabled people, veterans and combinations of the three. It’s a type of patronage, that lets Mayor Good ‘ol Boy drop by the senior center and VFW and pull in the votes.

Property taxes are essentially allocating the levy based on your proportional share of value. When they get out of control in small towns the effect is a two-tier system where some people pay dramatically more.

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

#140

Post by ribosometronome »

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.

IANAL as well, but isn't there a reasonable person standard test applied in law, sometimes? It seems like the issue here is that reasonable people are expected to not be able to parse contracts.
Post reply on HN