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Ask HN: Why is law stuff seemingly against normal people?

• DrScump 10y ago
  Legislation is like a programming language in that its keywords and grammar aren't necessarily chosen for its readability by laypeople.
  • ge96 10y ago
    It kind of reminds me of old books like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, ever try to read that book? Wow... Also I'm a jr web developer, I guess I could see how if you are not exposed/use something everyday you wouldn't know how to read it/understand it. At least code words are in "understandable English" I guess I don't know... ayeeee.... but I could see the parallel, that's why if you can't code/need something done you'd probably hire someone compare to a lawyer...
  • webmaven 10y ago
    Not so. It is rather that they were chosen for readability in a completely different context. It is as if, having progressed to the point of writing BASIC, future programmers were free to modify many things in subsequent languages to add or modify features, but rarely could anything be removed. For example they had to continue using the existing set of keywords. So you have the mother of all overloading problems, for example GOTO doesn't just jump to a line number anymore but can also call a function eg. GOTO[foo(bar="baz")]. Worse yet, foo isn't necessarily a function name, but might be a variable (in one of several scopes) containing the function name. And so on. The Law has been compared to spaghetti code. This is incorrect. It is a spaghetti language. The code is often very straightforward, given the syntax it has to be expressed in). For example the convention of declaring a variable upon first use of the value (and with a reverse infix notation at that) to achieve indirection (eg. "...bla bla city street state, hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" or "...yadda yadda in Appendix II, hereafter referred to as THE AGREEMENTS") is weird, but does make legal documents much easier to understand when disambiguated (no arguing which "they" is being referred to). Never mind that we as programmers would generally prefer those vars and values declared at the begining of the document outside the body of the text that uses them, it does work.
• PaulHoule 10y ago
  For one thing the law in the US derives from English common law and that in turn is affected by the fact that English is a train crash between an old Germanic tounge and the French spoken by the Norman invaders (who installed themselves as the upper class.) Thus vulgar words in English tend to be based on German roots but high-status language (the law) is based on Latin roots.
• pizza 10y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1aqh31/is_academic_philosophy_just_one_giant_language/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1aqh31/is_acade...
• sandworm101 10y ago
  Law is a layered subject. Once you have read enough of it you hit an inflection point where it becomes far less difficult. That is what law school is really all about. Most all lawyers can fly through a new case or law and pull out key elements within minutes. The language is actually not thay bad, but this comes from someone who enjoyed taxlaw classes. Try reading physics, maths or phylosophy papers. There too you must read a few hundred before things start to line up.
• Mz 10y ago
  Like any profession, one reason for the existence of legal terminology is that it needs to convey things precisely in a way that is not generally necessary outside the discipline. Outsides do not readily understand it because they may not have the legal frame of reference that requires certain nuanced distinctions. It also has grown organically over a long period of time. U.S. law is a mix of a variety of legal traditions, plus historic precedent within the U.S. Most U.S. states have legal systems that are largely rooted in English Common Law, except for Louisiana which has its roots in French legal traditions. However, it isn't as simple as that. For example, water rights and laws in California contain competing premises, one of which is from English Common Law and one of which is not. One of these premises is "First come, first served." The other is that you aren't supposed to take so much water from the river such that you completely deprive people downstream of its use. These are both part of the law in California and they are in direct competition. California alone has a very rich history in development of water rights and laws. From what I have read, countries that lack the sophisticated legal system such as that we enjoy in the U.S. typically have far bigger problems than what we face here with trying to parse the law.
  • anonnyj 10y ago
    My favorite such term is Act of God. Sounded absolutely ridiculous before I found out it had a specific meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God
    • acedinlowball 10y ago
      What about the phrase "Act of God" sounds absolutely ridiculous to you?
  • airbreather 10y ago
    I agree with your assertion regarding the need for a particular kind of preciseness, but it also well known to often be the case that jargon emerges in various professions/trades/cliques to make a "club" which favours members.
  • flukus 10y ago
• nnn1234 10y ago
  Seems to be against the common man is right. As the other commenters have said reasons are ,but not limited to 1. Moat for lawyers. If it was easy to write functional law, their wages would go down. 2. Precise control on level of vagueness to achieve desired result by forcing subjective interpretation 3. Need for precision and build of technical terms by practitioners I.e. Lingo People are experimenting with various things from Ethereum smart contracts to L4 a programming language for law. I have also stated a github repo www.github.com/naveenmishra88/opencontract So that we ccan collaborate on a crowdsourced plain English version of contracts that work for us rather than against.
  • ge96 10y ago
    That's interesting regarding the github repo to collaborate on "...plain English version of contracts...". I guess I just assume github is for code. It is free hosting and a nice version control tool to collaborate with. That must be a heck of a task too, so many documents. Wow.
    • beaconstudios 10y ago
      I would have thought that "plain-English contracts" would suffer from some of the same issues of trying to simplify programming - in order to write a spec accurate enough to turn into a program, you end up writing a program. Legal loopholes are big business and making contracts specific enough that they avoid serious loopholes would surely require the high level of complexity used in modern contract writing.
• ge96 10y ago
  This is not related just whining. I'm complaining about myself being dumb in the past. The whole internet thing is kind of a double-edge sword, like Linked In for example. Nothing against them, they're not doing anything wrong. I'm like "Oh look at me, I'm a dishwasher / full stack developer so and so" and then it's like debt collectors are like "Oh so you've got money do ya?" And also how they figure out where you live/your phone number based on your resumes (as a possible source) which you're trying to use to get a job... damn this sucks. I just feel scared, I hate that feeling too, like yes, I owe the money, but also I wish I paid the OC back rather than someone who bought my couple grand debt for tens of dollars. But why do I feel that way, is it greed? Am I bad? I don't know... sucks to be in this position.
• BjoernKW 10y ago
  In the Anglosphere the reason quite simply is the British Empire from which most countries inherited their respective legal systems. The English Common Law is about a thousand years old. It saw and weathered countless kings and queens, revolutions and - most importantly - linguistic upheaval of the English language, all of which contributed to its complexity and quirkiness. An interesting example of the linguistic changes that affected legal English are legal doublets ("null and void" for instance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet Those originally were intended precisely to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Legal doublets were an attempt to accommodate both Anglo-Saxon and French (and sometimes Latin) language roots in order to allow speakers of either to understand legal terms. To modern English speakers these terms are more of a cause for confusion rather than clarity. In addition, terms like 'null and void' nowadays add nothing to the precision of legal language but they keep being used because they're proven to work. They're a sort of legal cargo cult if you will. 'void' has exactly the same meaning as 'null and void' but we keep seeing the latter because lawyers cannot risk being linguistically progressive. They might lose a case if they don't use the terms everybody else in the legal business is used to. Hence, legal English only changes gradually and slowly.
• raarts 10y ago
  The real scary problem : if you have more money, you 'll have a better chance of winning. This goes against the principle that all men are equal and should be treated equally by the law.
• boyanpro 10y ago
  Elites (lawyers, bankers, doctors etc.) are the ones who create laws and they do it on purpose to make lower class underprivileged.