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

261–270 of 337 posts

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

#261

Post by limograf »

Quarrel wrote: post #28

I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…

Yeah. England&Wales legislation is fairly comprehensible. Of course it could be better. I just ran a random tax law through Hemingway and it scores between Grade 9 and 11, occasionally hitting Grade 13. So that's sort of fine, I think?

Apart from the bonkers preamble which decorates every act, of course!

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/40/introduction (Postgraduate, poor)

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

#262

Post by random314 »

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"?

It was the best of phrases, it was the worst of phrases.

https://www.charlesdickensinfo.com/quotes/it-was-the-best-of...

Also, how do you read paragraphs? Don't you have to keep the entire meaning in your head?

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

#263

Post by Closi »

johndhi wrote: post #37
Quarrel wrote: post #28

I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…

I tend to disagree. US law does require "plain language" in certain places (privacy policies for example) and that doesn't help. Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their legal requirements are harder to decipher.

> Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their legal requirements are harder to decipher.

This may be true, but the ambiguity of legal requirements is a separate issue entirely (i.e. the reason the requirements are amgibuous isn't because the language is simple, it's because the legal systems are very different, and sometimes the ambiguity is a feature rather than a flaw as it can help provide member countries a level of flexibility if maintaining the spirit of the law).

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

#264

Post by ThinkBeat »

This is of cours entirely the point.

Regular people are not meant to understand what it says and means.

If it was spelled out in plain simple English for everyone to read a lot more people would object to the terms and feel upset.

When it is obfuscated nearly to the point of encryption no normal person will be able to, or at least spend the time it would take to decrypt it.

This seems like a job where AI could be utilized to read legal language and output a plan English interpretation.

It also has to do with job security. You need lawyers to read them, because other lawyers write them.

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

#265

Post by Joker_vD »

margalabargala wrote: post #236
rayiner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Second Amendment is a bit more confusing than at first glance. "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed" Seems nice and straightforwards, right? Trouble is, that's just one of many versions. Different states ratified slightly different versions of the Second Amendment, the main difference being the presence of a…

The (personally) funny thing about the 2nd amendment is that since I am not a native English speaker, its syntax looks broken to me. Without "since" or "because" at the beginning it reads either as a non sequitur or as a "driving by the gas station, my hat flew off" kind of sentence: the subject suddenly changes midway through and (in my native language) it's a hallmark of non-literate speech which one would really, really like to not have in an important legal document.

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

#266

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

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"?

"In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone."

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

#267

Post by bobthepanda »

adastra22 wrote: post #251
giantg2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A great example is Measure A which was passed in the last election a few months back in Santa Clara county: > Shall the measure amending the Santa Clara Valley Water District Ordinance 11-01 to limit Board members to four successive four-year terms be adopted? Term limits? Heck yes! Voters agreed: term limits are A GOOD THING. Measure A passed! What wasn't mentioned AT ALL, anywhere in the question put to the voters,…

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?

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

#268

Post by AstralStorm »

_ggwa wrote: post #122
johndhi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the examiners can't enforce enablement, doesn't that mean it isn't a true requirement? And that in fact patents wind up being drafted not for the layperson?

Yes, my personal opinion is that enablement is not a true requirement in the US. I think a lot of problems with the current patent system would be helped by making the law stricter about enablement and also giving the USPTO more resources (money, in particular) so that examiners can enforce the enablement requirement. Also, to be clear: Patents legally aren't for laypeople. They're for people working in the field of…

Most patents omit crucial details to actually reproduce the invention. This is especially important in case of pharmaceutical and chemical patents. Full hardware and conditions are not documented nearly as well as a typical grad paper, which already tend to have holes.

"Software" patents, often similarly omit "irrelevant" modules.

Chocking it to "a specialist can make the module from scratch" is insufficient and should never be allowed.

In addition, a lot of the patents, due to lacking the details, are obvious as written to a specialist, just the details are not.

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

#269

Post by AstralStorm »

pdonis wrote: post #131
brnaftr361 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that many of the contacts are shrink wrapped - there's no way for you to modify the contract and rejection outright is not free.

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

#270

Post by comex »

Joker_vD wrote: post #265
margalabargala wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Second Amendment is a bit more confusing than at first glance. "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed" Seems nice and straightforwards, right? Trouble is, that's just one of many versions. Different states ratified slightly different versions of the Second Amendment, the main difference being the presence of a…

The (personally) funny thing about the 2nd amendment is that since I am not a native English speaker, its syntax looks broken to me. Without "since" or "because" at the beginning it reads either as a non sequitur or as a "driving by the gas station, my hat flew off" kind of sentence: the subject suddenly changes midway through and (in my native language) it's a hallmark of non-literate speech which one would really,…

For the record, the extra commas after “Militia” and “Arms” would be considered incorrect by modern standards, though the sentence would otherwise be fine (aside from capitalization).
Post reply on HN