5 ms·

Why can't they just use normal English language for contracts? How did it get to be this way?

by zaphod420 4y ago

Tomte 4y ago
For the same reason why programmers can't just use normal English when talking about software.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  So because the computer doesn't understand English, or because the terminology is often new and constantly changing?
  - choudharism 4y ago
    In a way, both - along with a third reason. English (like any natural language) is ambiguous and often depends on context. The attempt to "reinforce" ideas in English so that there is no way to have different interpretations is what lands you with legalese. Imagine having to program with that.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Because normal human language doesn't describe things exactly and exhaustively specifying the edge cases; as soon as you need do that (and you do, in law, programming, math proofs, etc), even if you don't use a single specific term you get language that looks like legalese. In essence, none of the commonly used English words means exactly what you need to, so you need to add many explicit qualifiers to specify which parts of that wide and vague meaning shall apply and which shall not.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
Sebguer 4y ago
Normal English evolves. Contracts rely on precise, shared understanding, and so it builds up its own jargon and shibboleths to represent concepts that everyone can have a singular understanding of. You don't want there to be any ambiguity in your contract, or any chance that courtroom precedents may not apply because your language differed from the 'norm'.
- tomrod 4y ago
  By your explanation, the language is broken by design. It cannot simultaneously not change while also develop shibboleths.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    The parent commenter said explicitly that Legal English¹ "builds up its own jargon and shibboleths". However, this type of change happens differently than how general English evolves. It might help to think of Legal English as a DSL. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English
    - tomrod 4y ago
      That's actually a great way to classify it and makes sense.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thrown_22 4y ago
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence English is so incredibly context sensitive at every level from word construction to paragraphs that words/sentences/paragraphs are meaningless on their own. You'd need a meta language to describe what the contracts mean. Which is what legal language is trying to be. If software engineers were building it today they'd probably add type judgments to each word/sentence/paragraph to enforce the right interpretation, e.g. (: ((: (time flies) noun) (: like proposition) (: (an arrow) noun)) sentence) I don't think most people would find that a large improvement in legibility.
brnaftr361 4y ago
It's about resolution, I think. What one needs functionally is a list of negations e.g. "thou shalt not"/"this does not" and affirmations "thou shalt"/"this does" most generally, the tightest feasible 95% CI - essentially bulletpoints. In looking at the human interaction space and regulating it, they're sort of trying to verbally describe the output of the Mandelbrot set while maintaining a coherent enough structure that it can be understood at a linguistic level by others. The closer they get to the ground truth the more complex things get in the explanations. And everybody doing this has gone down a specialized rabbithole, they have familiarity with a lineage of particular language that describes, fairly concisely, a known-good model for some contour in the set. At least that's what I get from it in the scientific domain. Like if I rambled this shit off to the general public - and maybe here - they wouldn't know what I was saying. What's a confidence interval, what's a Mandelbrot set, what implications does it have in the context, what do I mean by model..? Moreover the systems being scrutinized are based on precedence. Science works its way up to law, and court precedence sets the bar for future interpretations, including the structure of contracts - but also informally by understanding the grey areas in application, like what you can propose to people ignorant of the law that wouldn't be upheld by courts. So the specialist lineages are allowed to proliferate and remodel, I think it's something that simply comes as a product of persistent structures in... Any human endeavor. I'm no coder, but I've heard many times of horrifying outmoded codebases continuing forward, it's an artifact of systemic inertia and optimization around a nucleus of enduring legacy.
- johndhi 4y ago
  Accurate for law, too. In a contract: -commercial lawyer drafts indemnity paragraph (based on weird world of commercial law) -ip lawyer drafts ip paragraph (based on weird world of ip law) -litigator drafts termination clause Etc etc

Why can't they just use normal English language for contracts? How did it get to be this way?

Tomte 4y ago

For the same reason why programmers can't just use normal English when talking about software.

pessimizer 4y ago
So because the computer doesn't understand English, or because the terminology is often new and constantly changing?
- choudharism 4y ago
  In a way, both - along with a third reason. English (like any natural language) is ambiguous and often depends on context. The attempt to "reinforce" ideas in English so that there is no way to have different interpretations is what lands you with legalese. Imagine having to program with that.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Because normal human language doesn't describe things exactly and exhaustively specifying the edge cases; as soon as you need do that (and you do, in law, programming, math proofs, etc), even if you don't use a single specific term you get language that looks like legalese. In essence, none of the commonly used English words means exactly what you need to, so you need to add many explicit qualifiers to specify which parts of that wide and vague meaning shall apply and which shall not.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

Sebguer 4y ago

Normal English evolves. Contracts rely on precise, shared understanding, and so it builds up its own jargon and shibboleths to represent concepts that everyone can have a singular understanding of. You don't want there to be any ambiguity in your contract, or any chance that courtroom precedents may not apply because your language differed from the 'norm'.

tomrod 4y ago
By your explanation, the language is broken by design. It cannot simultaneously not change while also develop shibboleths.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  The parent commenter said explicitly that Legal English¹ "builds up its own jargon and shibboleths". However, this type of change happens differently than how general English evolves. It might help to think of Legal English as a DSL. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English
  - tomrod 4y ago
    That's actually a great way to classify it and makes sense.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thrown_22 4y ago

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence English is so incredibly context sensitive at every level from word construction to paragraphs that words/sentences/paragraphs are meaningless on their own. You'd need a meta language to describe what the contracts mean. Which is what legal language is trying to be. If software engineers were building it today they'd probably add type judgments to each word/sentence/paragraph to enforce the right interpretation, e.g. (: ((: (time flies) noun) (: like proposition) (: (an arrow) noun)) sentence) I don't think most people would find that a large improvement in legibility.

brnaftr361 4y ago

It's about resolution, I think. What one needs functionally is a list of negations e.g. "thou shalt not"/"this does not" and affirmations "thou shalt"/"this does" most generally, the tightest feasible 95% CI - essentially bulletpoints. In looking at the human interaction space and regulating it, they're sort of trying to verbally describe the output of the Mandelbrot set while maintaining a coherent enough structure that it can be understood at a linguistic level by others. The closer they get to the ground truth the more complex things get in the explanations. And everybody doing this has gone down a specialized rabbithole, they have familiarity with a lineage of particular language that describes, fairly concisely, a known-good model for some contour in the set. At least that's what I get from it in the scientific domain. Like if I rambled this shit off to the general public - and maybe here - they wouldn't know what I was saying. What's a confidence interval, what's a Mandelbrot set, what implications does it have in the context, what do I mean by model..? Moreover the systems being scrutinized are based on precedence. Science works its way up to law, and court precedence sets the bar for future interpretations, including the structure of contracts - but also informally by understanding the grey areas in application, like what you can propose to people ignorant of the law that wouldn't be upheld by courts. So the specialist lineages are allowed to proliferate and remodel, I think it's something that simply comes as a product of persistent structures in... Any human endeavor. I'm no coder, but I've heard many times of horrifying outmoded codebases continuing forward, it's an artifact of systemic inertia and optimization around a nucleus of enduring legacy.

johndhi 4y ago
Accurate for law, too. In a contract: -commercial lawyer drafts indemnity paragraph (based on weird world of commercial law) -ip lawyer drafts ip paragraph (based on weird world of ip law) -litigator drafts termination clause Etc etc