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

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

#161

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…

Frankly, it's still pretty obnoxious. And that's not on you, that's on the original.

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

#162
Isn't a lot of legal language intentionally written to be hard to understand? Doesn't that drive up billing hours for lawyers, and benefit those with the most lawyers?

Could we have more rules that difficult to understand language isn't enforceable? Could courts do more to rule against contracts that have poor language?

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

#163
post #107

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…

Wow, I actually had to vote on that and couldn't parse out what it was saying, so I left that one blank. I have a PhD, it's in computer science, but still.

As a rule of thumb, if the ballot measure is incomprehensible, you're safe in voting against it (which, obnoxiously enough, can sometimes mean voting yes)

There is never a good reason for using language this obtuse, but there's lots of bad reasons.

This measure in particular seems engineered to be just clear enough to be upheld by a judge, but also sufficiently obfuscated so that the public doesn't know what it's actually voting on.

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

#164

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…

The number one problem with this language is that everything is inlined because they don't have the concept of macros or variables. They have some variables but they are all ad-hoc designed into the language. For instance: ad-valorem means something but it's all from history. Adding a new term is a huge effort in this language.

Secondarily, they don't have a concept of macros except in a very ad-hoc sense. This means that they are afraid of macro use because they do not know the concepts of macro hygiene.

This is likely due to intentional creating a moat around the industry.

tl;dr Legalese is impenetrable because it uses the equivalent of Forth but POSIWID

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

#165

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 disagree with the assumption that the intent is for voters to understand what they are voting for. The purpose is to either get the vote or not. And language games, including intentional trickery, are a legally valid way of accomplishing either goal.

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

#167

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…

The number one problem with this language is that everything is inlined because they don't have the concept of macros or variables. They have some variables but they are all ad-hoc designed into the language. For instance: ad-valorem means something but it's all from history. Adding a new term is a huge effort in this language. Secondarily, they don't have a concept of macros except in a very ad-hoc sense. This means…

I don't know about that, for example contracts usually define their terms as they go along. "Hereinafter referred to as...". That's basically a #define macro.

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

#168
I have started making it a habit to read all Terms of Service and EULAs before accepting them, and particularly with financial stuff at stake, like opening a new account I need to read all the disclosures. Those financial agreements I've found to be comparatively well-written.

I also have occasion to sign off on a lot of health care-related agreements, and I find these to be very difficult: it's an emotional flashpoint for me, the documents are often presented in times of stress and the signature is extracted under some sort of duress.

Firstly, the health care facilities (and banks and others) now uniformly use electronic signature pads and they don't like to print the documents anymore. But if you insist, they will print them. This is a good pro forma procedure to force them to correlate what you're signing what what you've (presumably) read. But I've also found that it's nearly pointless to make a fuss about reading what you sign, because there's always a Swiss cheese of loopholes and convoluted phrasing that will confuse you.

Once a few years ago, I "carefully" read and signed off on a 3-page document for release of records, but no records were produced. (It failed silently, and the onus was on me to follow up.) Upon investigation, I found that the health care professional had prepared the document for me to authorize me to release records to me (rather than for the facility to release the facility's records to me). I attribute this to malice on his part - he was a jerk, and of course even after I read this document with a glaring error, I didn't catch it, either.

Nevertheless, don't let anyone shove an electronic signature pad in your hand before you've made an effort to read what you sign.

I've found it useful to read EULAs and TOS, though, for the simple fact that they include policies & procedures in case of dispute. If you have trouble with a service, you're supposed to know the steps for resolution, and if you haven't followed them, the service isn't under any obligation to hold your hand and walk you through it. The document often includes essential email and postal contact addresses, and I guarantee that you'll never find those contact addresses ever again if you don't print/save that document before ticking the "I agree" checkbox.

So I highly encourage you to make a folder in your cloud storage, or on your phone, and make liberal use of "Save/Print as PDF" for every TOS, EULA, and legal document that you sign or agree to. Eventually, you'll get into a situation, and you'll be thankful that you have recourse to the document you signed.

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

#169

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…

The assumption of most of the comments here is that bad writing is a matter of incompetence, but in the case of public policy I think Hanlon's Razor no longer applies. Given what we know about Texas politics and American ballot measures in general, it's quite possible that the ambiguity was introduced deliberately to give big landowners (or rather their lawyers) extra wiggle room. If that's true then the only communi…

It's not even the writing - it can be blatant misinterpretation. There's precedential opinion that states that you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's spirt. Yet there's a law that has "reasonable care" in it, but the precedential opinion on that is that it's a strict liability offense because 'applying reasonable care would frustrate enforcing the legislature's intent'...

The judges don't care. They're not impartial. They want the state to win more often than not. I mean, who pays their salary and what looks better than being part of law and order?

It can also be intentional deception. Look at the recent PA vote on retirement age of judges removing the language that provided voters info on the current age limit.

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

#170
post #73

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 wi…

thank you for this reply -- here in California, there is no secret that much building activity has been legally curtailed to such an extent that it becomes another endeavor entirely.. that of seeking and obtaining permission at every turn. Obscure and contradictory rule books specifically enable this kind of gatekeeping IMHO.

A big problem with US building codes is just there’s too many of them - every town has its own rules, so you can’t share knowledge or buildings between them.

Some of the common rules in the US don’t help though; aesthetic rules like setbacks are pointless and expensive, but even the safety rules other countries don’t have cause big problems. Can’t have single stair apartments and everything has to be built to accommodate gigantic fire trucks.

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