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I love how the Us supreme court judgements are written using low level terminology that most anyone can understand with little prior knowledge. Some countries u

I love how the Us supreme court judgements are written using low level terminology that most anyone can understand with little prior knowledge. Some countries use legal and complicated jargon that its hard to follow.

openasocket 6y ago
Based on my conversations with my wife, who is a lawyer, that plain language can be a little bit deceptive. While lawyers love their jargon and latin phrases, there's also a lot of very specific terms of art that sound like regular language. Terms like "reasonable" carry a lot of connotations and context in a legal decision that you don't get from the word alone. But yeah, I agree that these legal decisions are really easy for a layman to understand, even if I might miss some of the nuances.
coldpie 6y ago
We're getting pretty far off topic, but I love this article: https://loweringthebar.net/2017/02/octopoid-embrace.html https://loweringthebar.net/2017/02/octopoid-embrace.html
bitwize 6y ago
Supreme Court decisions are the next-best thing to black-letter law. It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all. Lower-court rulings have no shortage of legal jargon and terms of art with meanings that conflict with everyday meanings of those same words, because they're just part of the sausage making that is drafting and interpretation of the law. SCOTUS rulings can have these too, as the other responder indicated, but there's just fewer of them (and more clarifying language where necessary) because again, a SCOTUS ruling is a proclamation to the people, once and for all, of what the law has been settled to be.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  > It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all. > because again, a SCOTUS ruling is a proclamation to the people, once and for all, of what the law has been settled to be. That is not how our common-law legal system works. Even setting decisions that the court has later explicitly overruled aside, when the court announces a new rule, that rule is not totally complete and set in stone. Later decisions frequently flesh out, revise, or reinterpret prior decisions.

openasocket 6y ago

Based on my conversations with my wife, who is a lawyer, that plain language can be a little bit deceptive. While lawyers love their jargon and latin phrases, there's also a lot of very specific terms of art that sound like regular language. Terms like "reasonable" carry a lot of connotations and context in a legal decision that you don't get from the word alone. But yeah, I agree that these legal decisions are really easy for a layman to understand, even if I might miss some of the nuances.

coldpie 6y ago

We're getting pretty far off topic, but I love this article: https://loweringthebar.net/2017/02/octopoid-embrace.html https://loweringthebar.net/2017/02/octopoid-embrace.html

bitwize 6y ago

Supreme Court decisions are the next-best thing to black-letter law. It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all. Lower-court rulings have no shortage of legal jargon and terms of art with meanings that conflict with everyday meanings of those same words, because they're just part of the sausage making that is drafting and interpretation of the law. SCOTUS rulings can have these too, as the other responder indicated, but there's just fewer of them (and more clarifying language where necessary) because again, a SCOTUS ruling is a proclamation to the people, once and for all, of what the law has been settled to be.

kemitchell 6y ago
> It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all. > because again, a SCOTUS ruling is a proclamation to the people, once and for all, of what the law has been settled to be. That is not how our common-law legal system works. Even setting decisions that the court has later explicitly overruled aside, when the court announces a new rule, that rule is not totally complete and set in stone. Later decisions frequently flesh out, revise, or reinterpret prior decisions.