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> There was a good thread recently where a lawyer helps distinguish "perpetual" and "irrevocable", which us laypeople tend to confuse. Gosh, why does it have t

> There was a good thread recently where a lawyer helps distinguish "perpetual" and "irrevocable", which us laypeople tend to confuse. Gosh, why does it have to be this way? It's even harder for non-native speakers to read legal documents "correctly", i.e. the way courts would interpret them. I understand that contracts and laws need precise language, but, in contrast to, say, mathematics, reading legal documents is such an important activity that we cannot ignore the needs of laypeople – they have to follow contracts and laws, too, after all. And I don't think it's plausible that clashes between general use of words and legalese are unavoidable, especially as contracts don't seem to be optimized for brevity. And in general, us laypeople should vehemently demand contracts and laws to be optimized for easy reading. Imagine what good a precedent could do, where a complete EULAs was judged void, because they were to hard to read/understand/interpret.

ivraatiems 4y ago
The issue is that law, especially contract law, very often turns on the minutiae of what specifically was intended by a given statement in text. That's why contracts have pages and pages of definitions that seem obvious, and why courts assign special meanings to terms like "irrevocable". That is to say, at some point in the past, some court case probably turned on proving that "irrevocable" was supposed to mean something different than "perpetual," and so now the standard is to assume that's what it means, unless the contract explicitly says something different. What if I want a contract that I can't choose to take back, but which doesn't last forever? It's a problem of trying to force precision on a language that is inherently imprecise, topped off with concepts that are actually hard to understand.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I agree with you 100 %. The one thing we as lay people can do to protect ourselves though is to be humble, I.e. Not assume that we are experts and know what the rules are, or that words mean more than they do. It's a little like programming and requires literal frame of mind that doesn't run away. "Perpetual" is a time dimension and doesn't have a "no take backsies" dimension but our mind puts it there :). I see it all the time where people undertake actions or share advice or give instructions based solely on their intuitive sense on how law "should work" or "what makes sense" (while being blissfully unaware of this bias and assumption). As a personal example I went through a difficult divorce a decade ago. I read up on family law and talked to a lawyer. The divorce was made that much more difficult by my senior family members incessantly and continuously insisting upon things that were catastrophically wrong, but made perfect intuitive common sense to them (e.g. My dad spent 6 months telling me that my wife did not have any rights on the apartment that was in my name and I paid for. But it was marital home and in our jurisdiction she 100% totally absolutely had legal claim upon it. And million things like that).

ivraatiems 4y ago

The issue is that law, especially contract law, very often turns on the minutiae of what specifically was intended by a given statement in text. That's why contracts have pages and pages of definitions that seem obvious, and why courts assign special meanings to terms like "irrevocable". That is to say, at some point in the past, some court case probably turned on proving that "irrevocable" was supposed to mean something different than "perpetual," and so now the standard is to assume that's what it means, unless the contract explicitly says something different. What if I want a contract that I can't choose to take back, but which doesn't last forever? It's a problem of trying to force precision on a language that is inherently imprecise, topped off with concepts that are actually hard to understand.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

I agree with you 100 %. The one thing we as lay people can do to protect ourselves though is to be humble, I.e. Not assume that we are experts and know what the rules are, or that words mean more than they do. It's a little like programming and requires literal frame of mind that doesn't run away. "Perpetual" is a time dimension and doesn't have a "no take backsies" dimension but our mind puts it there :). I see it all the time where people undertake actions or share advice or give instructions based solely on their intuitive sense on how law "should work" or "what makes sense" (while being blissfully unaware of this bias and assumption). As a personal example I went through a difficult divorce a decade ago. I read up on family law and talked to a lawyer. The divorce was made that much more difficult by my senior family members incessantly and continuously insisting upon things that were catastrophically wrong, but made perfect intuitive common sense to them (e.g. My dad spent 6 months telling me that my wife did not have any rights on the apartment that was in my name and I paid for. But it was marital home and in our jurisdiction she 100% totally absolutely had legal claim upon it. And million things like that).