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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

#291

Post by denton-scratch »

sseagull wrote: post #282
alar44 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those semicolons can be replaced with periods and negates your point. That's just a string of ideas, not really one logical sentence.

Sort of. If you remove semicolons and use periods, you have to remove the ‘that’ as well. Then, to me, the sentence loses its impact. Theres a parallelism that is artistic, and makes everything flow. But in some sense this is art, not science; it shouldn’t be analyzed too much :)

> But in some sense this is art, not science; it shouldn’t be analyzed too much :)

I thought we were discussing law, not art. If legal drafting is to be compared with art, only art experts will gain.

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

#292

Post by duped »

rayiner wrote: post #184
tunesmith wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Secon…

> 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.

One of the catalysts to writing the Constitution in the first place was when a bunch of former soldiers took the guns they had lying around, tried to seize government munitions, and overthrow the Massachusetts government. The federal government couldn't raise an army to put down Shay's rebellion, and had to use local/private militia.

So it cuts both ways.

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

#293

Post by antiterra »

nwiswell wrote: post #163
jmugan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

The wording was awful but not malicious. The proposition passed by 87%, reducing the amount of school-allocated property taxes the disabled and elderly need to pay. Politically it was the perfect intersection of lowering taxes and social support program.

The main reason for the verbal atrocity is legislators had to cram a more or less complete description into a single sentence, per constitutional requirements.

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

#294

Post by antiterra »

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.

That’s exactly the opposite of what it does. Stuff like ‘reduce the limitation’ has the same ambiguity as ‘turn down the thermostat’ where it’s not clear if you are lowering the value or the effect.

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

#295

Post by giantg2 »

adastra22 wrote: post #280
bobthepanda wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Here in Washington, an "easy" fix for that is that the initiatives get a column for the "Yes" side and a column for the "no" side, in our voting booklets that we get in the mail with the ballots. But IIRC CA is still in person voting, right?

Yeah the voting booklet has the same design here, and the "No" side called them out on it. But who reads that? (Other than me and you, obviously.) The ballot itself had only the text which I quoted.

It seems most people don't even research the ballot before going to the polls. People are surprised by the referendums, so how can they make an informed decision? Many seem to go to the polls with the plan of filling out the super bubble to vote party line without even looking at the candidates on the ballot (Dem or Rep).

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

#296

Post by pessimizer »

alar44 wrote: post #226
gault8121 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are the text complexity scores from different measures for this text. Flesch Reading Ease score: -24 (text scale) Flesch Reading Ease scored your text: impossible to comprehend. Gunning Fog: 40.7 (text scale) Gunning Fog scored your text: EXTREMELY difficult to read. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 35.7 Grade level: College Graduate and above. The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 Grade level: college The SMOG Index: 25 Grade…

Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person? I don't see how that's feasible or desirable.

> Are you suggesting that our legal system should be understandable by the dumbest person?

If possible, on a case by case basis. If it's difficult, we lock people in a room for 8 hours a day from age 5 to 17, and don't let them leave until they understand. If it still doesn't work, we get rid of the law.

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

#297

Post by pessimizer »

antiterra wrote: post #293
nwiswell wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

The wording was awful but not malicious. The proposition passed by 87%, reducing the amount of school-allocated property taxes the disabled and elderly need to pay. Politically it was the perfect intersection of lowering taxes and social support program. The main reason for the verbal atrocity is legislators had to cram a more or less complete description into a single sentence, per constitutional requirements.

> The main reason for the verbal atrocity is legislators had to cram a more or less complete description into a single sentence, per constitutional requirements.

Or the other common reason, that they campaigned on getting a measure to the ballot that has voter support, but they don't want it to pass. The first thing you do is come up with a confusing text with extra points for double negatives, and you follow that up with a confusing media campaign.

You may fail, and it passes with 87%, but sometimes if you work hard enough you can get Illinois to vote down a progressive income tax.

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

#298

Post by spatulon »

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…

For comparison, here's the wording on the Brexit ballot papers in 2016:

> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Voters had to choose from one of the following:

- Remain a member of the European Union - Leave the European Union

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

#299

Post by sseagull »

denton-scratch wrote: post #291
sseagull wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. If you remove semicolons and use periods, you have to remove the ‘that’ as well. Then, to me, the sentence loses its impact. Theres a parallelism that is artistic, and makes everything flow. But in some sense this is art, not science; it shouldn’t be analyzed too much :)

> But in some sense this is art, not science; it shouldn’t be analyzed too much :) I thought we were discussing law, not art. If legal drafting is to be compared with art, only art experts will gain.

I suppose that's true. Got a little sidetracked there :)

Agree when it comes to law - utility trumps art.

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

#300

Post by ElemenoPicuares »

vjk800 wrote: post #250
max51 wrote: 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…

> 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. Senior engineers probably have their own intuition to what is "safe" based on their experience, which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe.

Which is great until the inspector comes.
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