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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

#181

Post by swayvil »

johndhi wrote: post #34
johndhi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is more applicable to a motion filed in court (one party is in battle with the other and has no reason to be friendly to the other party at all). In the case of contracts, you're partially right, but it's more nuanced. The weird thing about contracts is that at the time they are signed, two parties need to agree with each other. If you're hiring a software vendor and I am your lawyer, I need to…

Actually, clarification: what I'm saying applies to contracts between two sophisticated parties that are negotiating. If I'm Facebook and you're a user, there is no negotiation. So I try to make it as air tight as (legally) possible.

Lucid and illuminating. Thanks.

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

#183

Post by AlbertCory »

watwut wrote: post #148
oblio wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't such long phrases horrible writing, kind of by default?

You can have long readable phrases. The long phrase is bad rule is just beginner helper, nothing more nothing less.

Wrong. A long phrase requires the user to keep the entire meaning in their head until the end.

Can you show us some "long readable phrases"?

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

#184

Post by rayiner »

tunesmith wrote: post #155
xhevahir wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't researched it heavily, but wasn't that also true for the 2nd amendment? I doubt all the folks that ratified it agreed on its meaning.

That’s true in general. There was a lot of disagreement over the scope of things like the Commerce Clause, Necessary and Proper Clause, etc.

I don’t think that’s true of the Second Amendment specifically. It was written by a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government. I don’t think it’s a great mystery what they meant when they wrote the Second Amendment.

Insofar as the prefatory clause causes one to stumble, it was a common construct at the time tk have a “why” or explanatory clause prefacing an operative clause: https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYUL.... You read it exactly like you would read the following:

“Free political debate being necessary to the functioning of a free state, the freedom of speech shall not be abridged.”

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

#185

Post by supernova87a »

I lay a fair bit of fault also at an almost visual/UI level of how we write laws.

If you look at our law books, they are almost all words/text. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it. Yet in a lot of areas of law or regulation, graphical explanations are rarely used when they could help clarify immensely. To use a simple example, just think of when a map is needed -- and whether you would try to describe that by text.

I also have an analogy in my mind that when you ask a typical programmer to explain something, they start showing you the code. Only a skilled rare few have a picture in their mind that they can draw you the relationship between the things they have written (and start a chat based on that).

Lawyers / politicians are by default writing in long, wordy, text to try to lay out complicated systems. This is often not ideal, when a diagram or schematic of what you are legislating to have happen would be more clear.

It also produces an effect where laws tend to just bolt on more text, and have little contextualization of what already exists or what is being modified. And I also have a feeling it tends to miss the problem cases. I seriously believe our hundred books of CFR/laws are a significant result of this.

If people were forced to summarize how a proposed law interacts with current laws, etc. I think there would be more hesitation and better thought about what is being enacted.

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

#186

Post by ninefathom »

While the research appears well-considered and the article does indeed appear to make a valid conjecture, I'm a bit put off by the fact that the very first example of simplified "legalese" (re: severance payments, in the introduction) loses quite a bit of fidelity compared to the original. It even adds some major points for potential litigation due to ambiguous verbiage.

Rephrased, even the PIs seem to have trouble parsing legalese. That doesn't invalidate the conclusion of the research, but it does highlight the need for some additional peer review.

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

#187

Post by sseagull »

AlbertCory wrote: post #183
watwut wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have long readable phrases. The long phrase is bad rule is just beginner helper, nothing more nothing less.

Wrong. A long phrase requires the user to keep the entire meaning in their head until the end. Can you show us some "long readable phrases"?

Long, readable phrases (in literature, anyway) tend to be made up of independent clauses with semicolons, and are perfectly understandable (to me, anyway). I sometimes prefer long sentences in some forms of literature - short sentences can be choppy and halting.

"He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man." (Les Miserables, Hapgood translation)

Note that this is also probably easier to understand in context - standalone, I can see how it could be a bit confusing.

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

#188

Post by bubblethink »

This gives me an idea. Like obfuscated code competitions, can we get obfuscated contract competitions where the goal is two fold. 1) Write the most difficult to parse contracts, and 2) Sneak it into actual contracts with ever increasing importance. Eventually, one of these contracts/laws would go to trial, and nobody would be able to understand it. Hilarity ensues.

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

#189

Post by renewiltord »

HPsquared wrote: post #167
renewiltord wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that more akin to a constant? Because #define macros are quite powerful, they can also express constants.

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

#190

Post by andy_ppp »

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…

Does it mean we are banning the taxation of old or disabled people to pay for elementary and secondary school?

Seems a bit weird, why not just not do said thing, why is there a need for a law banning it? Is it just to make things difficult for the other side (presumably democrats)?

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