141–150 of 301 posts
I don't think there's much of a problem with actually reasoning about a law's text that a computer can help solve. The complicated bit is weighing equities, which still requires humans and lawyers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`. > Just googling things about it is going to be hard when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"? edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.
Catalá is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native. This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a independentist version of the old embrace, extend, extinguish. My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal concepts, they wi…
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling that tangle of references.
A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form.
When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they would read better as if statements.
It's not that I think those laws are written in legalese, it's that they are expressing logic in a suboptimal way. Like how "four plus four equals eight" is a suboptimal way to express what could be expressed with 4+4=8.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
I think this is a big part of it. My sense (as a non-lawyer who has looked at a fair number of laws and contracts) is that, in addition, there are plenty of laws and contracts that are just poorly written and wording or constructions that lawyers have retained out of caution or traditionalism. This last case, traditionalism and caution, is maybe a special case of the other cases, but it's not always obvious.
So instead of full-on jargon, legal texts get enshrined phrases, which practitioners can essentially skip over, but which also retain some meaning in plain English (though often sounding antiquated).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to othe…
The words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.
Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, police and others involved in the whole process.
For your example of "child": how often does it actually cause a problem in practice? How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means.
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
And the links! OMG, you could trace precedents and justifications and citations all the way back to the ur-utterances of Hammurabi. Reading that stuff could be quite educational.
For years I've tried to convince my lawyer friend that something exactly like this would be great to have, and then it turns out to have existed probably all the time. I think this is truly awesome. Every law should be written in a language like this, and presented publicly with syntax highlighting and consistent formatting rules. Then it should be made part of the school curriculum to learn the law language. I belie…
At the same time, laws have been codified (i.e. the case law rewritten coherently, combining all the patches combined), such as the Uniform Commercial Code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only conclude that they didn't know that. It's such a bad name; we won't even be able to google "catala lang" because ... Catala is also a "lang"! Imagine someone creates a programming language called Russian. Good luck googling "russian lang".
given that the major contributors seems to be from paris / bordeaux i am pretty sure they know about catalan.
Yes, but did they know that català is Catalan for Catalan? In French, as in English, it is catalan instead (well, English always capitalises it, French doesn't, but the spelling is identical).