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True of legalese in contracts, but also Law in general has multiplied like Gremlins. Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief en

True of legalese in contracts, but also Law in general has multiplied like Gremlins. Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief enough every subject could understand them. It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand. Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire, and it should be easier to remove a law than add one. Minimum Viable Law. Long ago lay people had no idea what the bible said because they could not read Latin. Well lawyers are the new priests, legalese is the new Latin.

kodablah 8y ago
> Law in general has multiplied It's no surprise reading the comments here and elsewhere these days. The media helps build a furor amongst people, and people believe there is no other choice but to use the heavy hand of the government to solve their issues. Many times it's done without alternatives attempted first with the proponents criticizing those against a law as against its intentions. We see it with the Patriot Act, GDPR, etc. And as global internet laws are written more and more by governments of citizens who implicitly trust them a lot (often just guessing at what can solve the problem instead of empirical evidence based on timid baby steps), their tentacles spread to the point where only those with resources can abide. Things happen in waves and I can only hope we'll come around to not adding laws and regulations all the time.
- lovich 8y ago
  The power of corporations is at this point like a smaller government with some companies wielding more power than smaller nation states. We are currently in an upswing of corporations extracting more and more money out of people and trying to control them more and more. What are people supposed to do? Wait for companies to just change out of the goodness of their hearts? You cant even talk with your wallet anymore when many practices that are anti consumer, such as tracking every bit of data about you and selling it to anyone, are industry wide practices, couple with the fact that the larger corporations are inching closer and closer to the same level of monopoly power as the robber barons 100+ years ago. Government overreach is bad, and the government is frequently a bad actor itself, but at least if they are trying to cancel out corporations power we end up with both groups hobbling themselves a bit
gizmo385 8y ago
> Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief enough every subject could understand them. While laws being written in common language sounds like a good idea, common language is open to lots of ambiguity and loopholes. Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible?
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible? But they aren't that either. There will always be more diversity in real life than on paper. You can't predict everything that will ever happen. The real problem is structural. We have a set of laws and if they're overly broad and prohibit lots of things they shouldn't, nobody really notices because prosecutorial discretion is a thing. As long as prosecutors mostly don't charge honest people with the overly broad laws, nobody gets up in arms to fix them even though everyone is in violation. On the other hand, if someone does something unpopular and there is no law against it -- or there is a law against it but there isn't a law specifically against it and Something Must Be Done -- then we get a new overly broad law. Laws get added but never removed, and each one prohibits more than it should. Over a hundred years of this and you get Three Felonies A Day, the only reason everyone isn't in prison is prosecutorial discretion, and lawyering is an exercise in figuring out which parts of which laws you actually have to follow to avoid being prosecuted without ever admitting that that's what's happening.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  > Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible? But in practice, it's the opposite. Law is full of ambiguities and loopholes. That's why we hire lawyers-- to find ones that work in our favor.
- grabeh 8y ago
  Funnily enough even the tightest drafted legalese is actually often subject to a range of ambiguity and loopholes. I feel it can be a quality inherent in certain language regardless of whether it's plain English or legalese, particularly if there is money at stake in injecting a degree of ambiguity into the language (which is what I'm paid to do!). Overall, if done correctly there should be no issue with expressing the parties' intentions in plain English rather than using dense legalese. It's something I strive to do every day in my job for sure. Of course I agree with your general point about laws being drafted to be precise and narrow, it's just that using legalese doesn't always secure this objective. Sometimes it's just clear that the draftsperson was having a bad day.
Letmesleep69 8y ago
> It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand Why does that not make sense? The law must cover everything from "dont kill certain species" to "don't commit this very specific type of fraud". Society is so advanced we need more laws. Of course Hamurabi's code was short because it didn't need to stop investment bankers committing fraud or voting laws to prevent racial bias or workers rights etc etc. Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read.
- nordsieck 8y ago
  The garbage part is not that there is a large volume of law, but that the law is made even larger implicitly through a system of historical precedent without being explicitly updated to reflect those changes. As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it. Another easy example in the opposite direction is how case law has substantially diluted the meaning of words like "infringe", "unreasonable" and "excessive" in amendments 2^1, 2^2 and 2^3.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it. Any support for that statement?
    - lainga 8y ago
      I think you would be hard-pressed to find a layman who, when presented with the commerce clause, replied that he had inferred the Dormant Clause [0] or Civil Rights Act [1] from it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 - "... principally its power to regulate interstate commerce"
kbenson 8y ago
Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. Terms have specific, sometimes slightly different or more narrow meanings to promote better understanding of intent in languages meant to specify a set of rules. Specifying laws in "plain English" makes about as much sense to me as programming in English. You'll quickly find that for all but the most trivial of things the ambiguity of the language works against you.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? The difference is that one is expected to consent and be beholden to something they could not reasonably understand without paying a large amount of money to a specialist. That I write my code in brainfuck is of no consequence to someone, unless that brainfuck is potentially going to incarcerate them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > That I write my code in brainfuck is of no consequence to someone, unless that brainfuck is potentially going to incarcerate them. If you write software to control medical equipment in Brainfuck, it's potentially of consequence to a great many people. Same for autonomous driving routines. Trying to make things clearer is a good cause. Expecting that everything can be made clear enough for the average person is a fool's errand. Do we expect the circuit layouts of CPUs to be understandable by everyone? Because we are surely affected by those, in very many aspects of our lives. Do we expect the full engineering and aeronautics behind an airplane to be understood by everyone? Everyone who flies puts their lives on the line based on those principles and the engineers getting it right. Do we all expect to understand the numerous ways in which our bodies can get hurt, or interact with chemicals, or develop diseases? We trust doctors to figure out the complications there. In each case, we've trusted domain experts to sort through the very complex topic and distill the knowledge into a useful form for us. In each case, we also generally know a core amount of the topic to help us navigate the everyday portions. CPUs work by providing a very low level core set of instructions that can be followed. Airplanes work through thrust, airflow and lift. Our bodies deteriorate over time, and if we put bad stuff in, they don't do as well, and some common diseases are known (cold, flu, etc). The law is no different. There's a core set of things people are aware of. As things become more specific, or a problem happens, we call in domain experts to help. Expecting everyone to be able to read all of the legal code will never happen, nor should it happen. It's expecting too much out of the average person, and would also require the law be dumbed down in ways that were detrimental to it's interpretation.
CPLX 8y ago
> Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire This is a terrible idea. Stability and gradual, generally understandable, evolution in response to real world conditions are positive attributes of the current precedent-based system that has grown out of the common law.
- mooneater 8y ago
  The current default is accretion. There is no end to it. We will drown in laws.
- milankovic 8y ago
  I disagree. Of all ideas, I think this is his best one.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    It's a great idea until "no murder" gets held up by the minority party to win leverage on some other issue. There'd always be some critical law to play chicken with.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  Why? What's so bad about forcing us to re-evaluate the reasons why given laws are on the books? Plenty of laws are relevant only to a specific point in time, but they rarely, if ever, get repealed. Take the US Chicken Tax. It was put in place in the 60s to deal with economic concerns with France and West Germany at the time (which no longer exists as such!). Why shouldn't it have been given an expiration date? Instead, it remains in perpetuity, with its provisions twisted every few years to suit the interests of auto industry lobbyists. This is perverse.
  - jkaplowitz 8y ago
    Some laws, like that one, should be enacted with an expiration date. Some laws even are - e.g. a lot of the post-9/11 surveillance state laws need periodic reauthorization. Plenty of other taxes are enacted as temporary, too, despite how routinely they're extended. But not all laws should expire. Having, say, the crime of murder expire would be quite unhelpful.
golergka 8y ago
This comment could be made about software and programmers and make exactly as much sense.
vkou 8y ago
Hammurabi's code was simple, but did little to deal with edge cases. One of the reasons that the body of law has grown as large as it has is because of said edge cases.
jabv 8y ago
This perspective on the bible and Latin is not a good analogy. Most people could not read any language long ago, and priests in general serve several other purposes before reading/expounding upon the bible. From the standpoint of a believer, the bible was not expanded by human decision as laws are (canonical vs. apocryphal discussions aside). The bible was compiled in Latin by Jerome because it was the common ('vulgar') language of the people. Of course, there's plenty to discuss and argue about in all of the above, but your comparison makes it seem like a done deal.
mhneu 8y ago
Rule of law is a really good thing in most societies.

kodablah 8y ago

> Law in general has multiplied It's no surprise reading the comments here and elsewhere these days. The media helps build a furor amongst people, and people believe there is no other choice but to use the heavy hand of the government to solve their issues. Many times it's done without alternatives attempted first with the proponents criticizing those against a law as against its intentions. We see it with the Patriot Act, GDPR, etc. And as global internet laws are written more and more by governments of citizens who implicitly trust them a lot (often just guessing at what can solve the problem instead of empirical evidence based on timid baby steps), their tentacles spread to the point where only those with resources can abide. Things happen in waves and I can only hope we'll come around to not adding laws and regulations all the time.

lovich 8y ago
The power of corporations is at this point like a smaller government with some companies wielding more power than smaller nation states. We are currently in an upswing of corporations extracting more and more money out of people and trying to control them more and more. What are people supposed to do? Wait for companies to just change out of the goodness of their hearts? You cant even talk with your wallet anymore when many practices that are anti consumer, such as tracking every bit of data about you and selling it to anyone, are industry wide practices, couple with the fact that the larger corporations are inching closer and closer to the same level of monopoly power as the robber barons 100+ years ago. Government overreach is bad, and the government is frequently a bad actor itself, but at least if they are trying to cancel out corporations power we end up with both groups hobbling themselves a bit

gizmo385 8y ago

> Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief enough every subject could understand them. While laws being written in common language sounds like a good idea, common language is open to lots of ambiguity and loopholes. Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible?

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible? But they aren't that either. There will always be more diversity in real life than on paper. You can't predict everything that will ever happen. The real problem is structural. We have a set of laws and if they're overly broad and prohibit lots of things they shouldn't, nobody really notices because prosecutorial discretion is a thing. As long as prosecutors mostly don't charge honest people with the overly broad laws, nobody gets up in arms to fix them even though everyone is in violation. On the other hand, if someone does something unpopular and there is no law against it -- or there is a law against it but there isn't a law specifically against it and Something Must Be Done -- then we get a new overly broad law. Laws get added but never removed, and each one prohibits more than it should. Over a hundred years of this and you get Three Felonies A Day, the only reason everyone isn't in prison is prosecutorial discretion, and lawyering is an exercise in figuring out which parts of which laws you actually have to follow to avoid being prosecuted without ever admitting that that's what's happening.
jstarfish 8y ago
> Shouldn't our laws, in general, be written to be as precise and narrowly defined as possible? But in practice, it's the opposite. Law is full of ambiguities and loopholes. That's why we hire lawyers-- to find ones that work in our favor.
grabeh 8y ago
Funnily enough even the tightest drafted legalese is actually often subject to a range of ambiguity and loopholes. I feel it can be a quality inherent in certain language regardless of whether it's plain English or legalese, particularly if there is money at stake in injecting a degree of ambiguity into the language (which is what I'm paid to do!). Overall, if done correctly there should be no issue with expressing the parties' intentions in plain English rather than using dense legalese. It's something I strive to do every day in my job for sure. Of course I agree with your general point about laws being drafted to be precise and narrow, it's just that using legalese doesn't always secure this objective. Sometimes it's just clear that the draftsperson was having a bad day.

Letmesleep69 8y ago

> It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand Why does that not make sense? The law must cover everything from "dont kill certain species" to "don't commit this very specific type of fraud". Society is so advanced we need more laws. Of course Hamurabi's code was short because it didn't need to stop investment bankers committing fraud or voting laws to prevent racial bias or workers rights etc etc. Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read.

nordsieck 8y ago
The garbage part is not that there is a large volume of law, but that the law is made even larger implicitly through a system of historical precedent without being explicitly updated to reflect those changes. As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it. Another easy example in the opposite direction is how case law has substantially diluted the meaning of words like "infringe", "unreasonable" and "excessive" in amendments 2^1, 2^2 and 2^3.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  As an easy example, the commerce clause in the US constitution has come to mean something that no layman would ascribe to it. Any support for that statement?
  - lainga 8y ago
    I think you would be hard-pressed to find a layman who, when presented with the commerce clause, replied that he had inferred the Dormant Clause [0] or Civil Rights Act [1] from it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 - "... principally its power to regulate interstate commerce"

kbenson 8y ago

Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. Terms have specific, sometimes slightly different or more narrow meanings to promote better understanding of intent in languages meant to specify a set of rules. Specifying laws in "plain English" makes about as much sense to me as programming in English. You'll quickly find that for all but the most trivial of things the ambiguity of the language works against you.

mieseratte 8y ago
> Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? The difference is that one is expected to consent and be beholden to something they could not reasonably understand without paying a large amount of money to a specialist. That I write my code in brainfuck is of no consequence to someone, unless that brainfuck is potentially going to incarcerate them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kbenson 8y ago
  > That I write my code in brainfuck is of no consequence to someone, unless that brainfuck is potentially going to incarcerate them. If you write software to control medical equipment in Brainfuck, it's potentially of consequence to a great many people. Same for autonomous driving routines. Trying to make things clearer is a good cause. Expecting that everything can be made clear enough for the average person is a fool's errand. Do we expect the circuit layouts of CPUs to be understandable by everyone? Because we are surely affected by those, in very many aspects of our lives. Do we expect the full engineering and aeronautics behind an airplane to be understood by everyone? Everyone who flies puts their lives on the line based on those principles and the engineers getting it right. Do we all expect to understand the numerous ways in which our bodies can get hurt, or interact with chemicals, or develop diseases? We trust doctors to figure out the complications there. In each case, we've trusted domain experts to sort through the very complex topic and distill the knowledge into a useful form for us. In each case, we also generally know a core amount of the topic to help us navigate the everyday portions. CPUs work by providing a very low level core set of instructions that can be followed. Airplanes work through thrust, airflow and lift. Our bodies deteriorate over time, and if we put bad stuff in, they don't do as well, and some common diseases are known (cold, flu, etc). The law is no different. There's a core set of things people are aware of. As things become more specific, or a problem happens, we call in domain experts to help. Expecting everyone to be able to read all of the legal code will never happen, nor should it happen. It's expecting too much out of the average person, and would also require the law be dumbed down in ways that were detrimental to it's interpretation.

CPLX 8y ago

> Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire This is a terrible idea. Stability and gradual, generally understandable, evolution in response to real world conditions are positive attributes of the current precedent-based system that has grown out of the common law.

mooneater 8y ago
The current default is accretion. There is no end to it. We will drown in laws.
milankovic 8y ago
I disagree. Of all ideas, I think this is his best one.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  It's a great idea until "no murder" gets held up by the minority party to win leverage on some other issue. There'd always be some critical law to play chicken with.
jstarfish 8y ago
Why? What's so bad about forcing us to re-evaluate the reasons why given laws are on the books? Plenty of laws are relevant only to a specific point in time, but they rarely, if ever, get repealed. Take the US Chicken Tax. It was put in place in the 60s to deal with economic concerns with France and West Germany at the time (which no longer exists as such!). Why shouldn't it have been given an expiration date? Instead, it remains in perpetuity, with its provisions twisted every few years to suit the interests of auto industry lobbyists. This is perverse.
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  Some laws, like that one, should be enacted with an expiration date. Some laws even are - e.g. a lot of the post-9/11 surveillance state laws need periodic reauthorization. Plenty of other taxes are enacted as temporary, too, despite how routinely they're extended. But not all laws should expire. Having, say, the crime of murder expire would be quite unhelpful.

golergka 8y ago

This comment could be made about software and programmers and make exactly as much sense.

vkou 8y ago

Hammurabi's code was simple, but did little to deal with edge cases. One of the reasons that the body of law has grown as large as it has is because of said edge cases.

jabv 8y ago

This perspective on the bible and Latin is not a good analogy. Most people could not read any language long ago, and priests in general serve several other purposes before reading/expounding upon the bible. From the standpoint of a believer, the bible was not expanded by human decision as laws are (canonical vs. apocryphal discussions aside). The bible was compiled in Latin by Jerome because it was the common ('vulgar') language of the people. Of course, there's plenty to discuss and argue about in all of the above, but your comparison makes it seem like a done deal.

mhneu 8y ago

Rule of law is a really good thing in most societies.