6 ms·

This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, the

by max51 4y ago

This is so common (not just in the EU) that it makes me feel like it was done by design in a lot of cases. By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us (including other politicians) will never read them and instead have to rely on faith. It feels to me like they want to give you the illusion that it's all open/public but at the same time they don't want other people to read it. The fact that even the politicians signing on it can't understand it should raise a lot of red flags. We should treat them the same way that an anti-virus treats "safe" code with payloads that are obfuscated using techniques also used by viruses (a big reason why you get false positives on cracks and keygens btw). We should assume that they are trying to hide something they don't want us to see when they make their bills extremely hard to read even for lawyers.

Dalewyn 4y ago
Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes. That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.
- max51 4y ago
  I have no problem with the vocabulary itself and most of the Legalese. I try to use more of it in my documentation because, as you mentioned, it has less room to interpretation and loopholes compared to more commonly used phrasing. My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly. Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes. When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.
- the8472 4y ago
  > That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. And yet they end up with unintended consequences all the time (some of which were predicted by outside observers), outdated laws are kept on the books, tax advisors keep finding loopholes, laws are regularly taken down by constitutional courts over concerns that opponents pointed out in advance etc. etc. If that obtuse legalese is helping at all it's barely so. I don't know what would help. Maybe laws should start with outcome specifications and a bunch of policies that are applicable conditional on achieving the stated outcomes? More adversarial testing in advance, involving some game theory?
- feanaro 4y ago
  Yet at the same time you always hear people repeat that law isn't code, and it isn't dumb, and the spirit of the law is more important than any loophole. That if you try exploiting a loophole, you will just get caught and shot down. So which is it? And if the wording of the law is meant to prevent loopholes, then this could be accomplished in better ways than writing extremely convoluted sentences over and over again. There are patterns to the loopholes and to the disclaimers meant to prevent them, which means we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with shorter, well-defined qualifiers.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    PHP got the nullsafe operator in version 8.0, released in 2020. That's two and a half decades of language improvement before this common idiom: $foo = getFoo(); if ( !$foo ) { return null; } $foo = $foo->getBar(); if ( !$foo ) { return null; } return $foo->getBaz(); ...could be replaced with this: return getFoo()?->getBar()?->getBaz(); And that was with a strong committee actually interested in improving the language. > we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need > to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with > shorter, well-defined qualifiers. The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown, and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve. Some might even call the ambiguity and ability to argue semantics a feature.
    - feanaro 4y ago
      > The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown, If you define the qualifiers to be a literal shorthand for the current status quo litany, what side-effects do you envision, other than better readability? > and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve. Does it, though? With the long-winded expensive processes favouring those with capital and punishing those with none into unjust settlements for fear of debilitating costs? With practically requiring expensive lawyers in order to have any hope of navigating the byzantine mazes of modern law?
sjy 4y ago
Rather than assuming bad faith, I think it makes more sense to treat these documents like the codebase for a large open source software project. Perhaps there are reasons, not apparent to someone who hasn’t spent months working on the code and the systems it integrates with, for what appears to be unnecessary complexity. And perhaps it’s reasonable for people to advocate for or against using the project without having read and understood every line of code themselves.
- max51 4y ago
  The way I see it, there is also good reason why keygens are encrypting their payload. But that doesn't change the fact that getting viruses from them was extremely common until we got reputable repack site (eg. fit-girl) that tests them for us. You also have to keep in mind that it's not just the average people who can't understand them, even the people writing and voting on them can't understand the content. The journalist reporting on them also don't understand the content. It's like downloading an installer from a hacker on 4chan who can't remember exactly what it does, why it's so big and why it has a big encrypted payload. Would you install it on your production environment? His package will probably solve whatever problem you wanted to fix... but who knows what else is in there or if a friend that collaborated with him put a virus in there. The reason why viruses spread so much with cracked content is that the crack were actually working.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us Of course it is by design, not necessarily for evil purposes though. First of all, the fact that laws are written in a "natural language" doesn't imply they can be fully understood by everyone, they are more like a math formula, it's only less obvious that laws need to be crafted in a way that requires an extensive knowledge of the subject. They're readable, but not always intelligible. Natural languages are ambiguous, laws try to avoid it as much as they can, changing a word can often change the law intentions completely. Secondly, exactly like scientific papers, if they have some kind of impact in the community, experts are gonna look at them, you can bet on it (also don't forget the army of lawyers companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. have on their payroll). And they will cover the entire spectrum from the most complacent to the biggest opponents and everything in between, so it's not actually like they will pass unnoticed. There's too much to gain in exposing your political opponents (and sometimes allies) to not take advantage from it. No professional politician would miss the opportunity. It's no secret that many politicians have a training in law and the reason is obvious. For example in the US of the 535 members who make up Congress, 40% had attended law school. For senators, nearly 54% have obtained a law degree. The House contains 37% law degree holders > We should assume that they are trying to hide something To assume this we should also assume that they - whoever they are, it's not clear to me - are all on board with the "evil plan" which is arguably very far from the facts we can prove. In the game of assuming bad faith, we could equally assume that the opposition to this particular proposal is paid by the big tech corporations to avoid investing a lot of money to update their systems and losing the vendor lock in (WhatsApp messages are readable only by WhatsApp, Instagram messages only by Instagram, and so on...)
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think you are assuming too much competence. If lawmakers are anything like other employees, then 80% of them are there just for the paycheck. They’re not going to expend any extra effort to fully understand a complicated law that they’re not particularly invested in. Chances are very few of them actually consider where this could lead, not because they’re malicious, but because they just cannot be bothered. They’re probably working on their own fancy laws that will be much more popular with their voters.
dustingetz 4y ago
legal complexity is emergent from raw freedom - everything becomes a negotiation
Kretinsky 4y ago
I worked for my government, in the EU, and participated in the creation of such laws. The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text. Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim. I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality. Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs. The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > very few laws to completely shut down dissent except it would mean silencing millions of people, which is frankly more similar to the intro of a sci-fi novel than modern France. See what's happening in Israel, not even the omnipotent Netanyahu could go against the huge popular protests. > Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, That's the same right everyone has in Europe. Nobody can be forced to publicly show their private conversations. Only the authorities can ask for them in the case of a trial, if a judge gives the authorization. > but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. That's a non sequitur. The law is not about "surrender your private communications", first of all because E2E it's about secrecy, not privacy, privacy still exists without secrecy, and even if it was, Von der Leyen (that I dislike, to use an euphemism) would be subject to it too. The real World does not work like Gotham City.
Barrin92 4y ago
Legal documents aren't complicated because some cabal of evil lawyers has decided to make the text hard to understand for you, they're complicated because legal concepts require precision and specificity that ordinary language isn't able to express. It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehension of an 8th grader, if deception was the goal they'd hardly need to try that hard. EU documents are complicated because more than two-dozen national governments and thousands of people work on these texts because they can't ever agree on anything without throwing in 500 exceptions for each country, it's that simple, there's no tinfoil conspiracy.
- geysersam 4y ago
  It's interesting to think about how perhaps some ideas from software and programming language theory could be applied in legal settings. The requirements are quite similar. Unambiguous interpretation of precisely defined concepts. Particularly, it might allow much more efficient searching in legal texts. Imagine automatically searching for inconsistencies/loopholes or other "bugs" in the legal system. I'm reminded of the "oops I wrote a compiler" meme reding your comment about legalese requiring "precision and specificity ordinary language is not able to express".

by max51 4y ago

Dalewyn 4y ago

Legalese is like that thanks to a long history of people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes. That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.

max51 4y ago
I have no problem with the vocabulary itself and most of the Legalese. I try to use more of it in my documentation because, as you mentioned, it has less room to interpretation and loopholes compared to more commonly used phrasing. My problem is when they take what should have been a simple table with a few columns and turn it into a 9-line long sentence with triple negations, exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and abusing references to other sections to create these puzzles that are very hard to solve. If they need it for some reason, they should also provide the easy-to-read version alongside it. I would prefer that the easy version came from the same people who wrote the original bill instead of a college textbook or a journalist relying on second hand information because he also can't read it properly. Mixing multiple unrelated subject into a single bill is also completely unnecessary from the pov preventing loopholes. When it gets to the point that even the people voting on it can't understand/read it, something needs to change. How do you know they didn't slip in intentional loophole? Even with a well intentioned politicians, the intern typing it could sneak something in.
the8472 4y ago
> That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes. And yet they end up with unintended consequences all the time (some of which were predicted by outside observers), outdated laws are kept on the books, tax advisors keep finding loopholes, laws are regularly taken down by constitutional courts over concerns that opponents pointed out in advance etc. etc. If that obtuse legalese is helping at all it's barely so. I don't know what would help. Maybe laws should start with outcome specifications and a bunch of policies that are applicable conditional on achieving the stated outcomes? More adversarial testing in advance, involving some game theory?
feanaro 4y ago
Yet at the same time you always hear people repeat that law isn't code, and it isn't dumb, and the spirit of the law is more important than any loophole. That if you try exploiting a loophole, you will just get caught and shot down. So which is it? And if the wording of the law is meant to prevent loopholes, then this could be accomplished in better ways than writing extremely convoluted sentences over and over again. There are patterns to the loopholes and to the disclaimers meant to prevent them, which means we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with shorter, well-defined qualifiers.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  PHP got the nullsafe operator in version 8.0, released in 2020. That's two and a half decades of language improvement before this common idiom: $foo = getFoo(); if ( !$foo ) { return null; } $foo = $foo->getBar(); if ( !$foo ) { return null; } return $foo->getBaz(); ...could be replaced with this: return getFoo()?->getBar()?->getBaz(); And that was with a strong committee actually interested in improving the language. > we could reasonably define better abstractions to avoid the need > to verbosely repeat each pattern each time by replacing them with > shorter, well-defined qualifiers. The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown, and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve. Some might even call the ambiguity and ability to argue semantics a feature.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    > The side-effects of those qualifiers are untested and unknown, If you define the qualifiers to be a literal shorthand for the current status quo litany, what side-effects do you envision, other than better readability? > and the current long legalese serves the people that it is meant to serve. Does it, though? With the long-winded expensive processes favouring those with capital and punishing those with none into unjust settlements for fear of debilitating costs? With practically requiring expensive lawyers in order to have any hope of navigating the byzantine mazes of modern law?

sjy 4y ago

Rather than assuming bad faith, I think it makes more sense to treat these documents like the codebase for a large open source software project. Perhaps there are reasons, not apparent to someone who hasn’t spent months working on the code and the systems it integrates with, for what appears to be unnecessary complexity. And perhaps it’s reasonable for people to advocate for or against using the project without having read and understood every line of code themselves.

max51 4y ago
The way I see it, there is also good reason why keygens are encrypting their payload. But that doesn't change the fact that getting viruses from them was extremely common until we got reputable repack site (eg. fit-girl) that tests them for us. You also have to keep in mind that it's not just the average people who can't understand them, even the people writing and voting on them can't understand the content. The journalist reporting on them also don't understand the content. It's like downloading an installer from a hacker on 4chan who can't remember exactly what it does, why it's so big and why it has a big encrypted payload. Would you install it on your production environment? His package will probably solve whatever problem you wanted to fix... but who knows what else is in there or if a friend that collaborated with him put a virus in there. The reason why viruses spread so much with cracked content is that the crack were actually working.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> By creating these massive overcomplicated bills, they make sure only a handful of individuals are capable of reading them and the rest of us Of course it is by design, not necessarily for evil purposes though. First of all, the fact that laws are written in a "natural language" doesn't imply they can be fully understood by everyone, they are more like a math formula, it's only less obvious that laws need to be crafted in a way that requires an extensive knowledge of the subject. They're readable, but not always intelligible. Natural languages are ambiguous, laws try to avoid it as much as they can, changing a word can often change the law intentions completely. Secondly, exactly like scientific papers, if they have some kind of impact in the community, experts are gonna look at them, you can bet on it (also don't forget the army of lawyers companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. have on their payroll). And they will cover the entire spectrum from the most complacent to the biggest opponents and everything in between, so it's not actually like they will pass unnoticed. There's too much to gain in exposing your political opponents (and sometimes allies) to not take advantage from it. No professional politician would miss the opportunity. It's no secret that many politicians have a training in law and the reason is obvious. For example in the US of the 535 members who make up Congress, 40% had attended law school. For senators, nearly 54% have obtained a law degree. The House contains 37% law degree holders > We should assume that they are trying to hide something To assume this we should also assume that they - whoever they are, it's not clear to me - are all on board with the "evil plan" which is arguably very far from the facts we can prove. In the game of assuming bad faith, we could equally assume that the opposition to this particular proposal is paid by the big tech corporations to avoid investing a lot of money to update their systems and losing the vendor lock in (WhatsApp messages are readable only by WhatsApp, Instagram messages only by Instagram, and so on...)

Aeolun 4y ago
I think you are assuming too much competence. If lawmakers are anything like other employees, then 80% of them are there just for the paycheck. They’re not going to expend any extra effort to fully understand a complicated law that they’re not particularly invested in. Chances are very few of them actually consider where this could lead, not because they’re malicious, but because they just cannot be bothered. They’re probably working on their own fancy laws that will be much more popular with their voters.

dustingetz 4y ago

legal complexity is emergent from raw freedom - everything becomes a negotiation

Kretinsky 4y ago

I worked for my government, in the EU, and participated in the creation of such laws. The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text. Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim. I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality. Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs. The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> very few laws to completely shut down dissent except it would mean silencing millions of people, which is frankly more similar to the intro of a sci-fi novel than modern France. See what's happening in Israel, not even the omnipotent Netanyahu could go against the huge popular protests. > Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, That's the same right everyone has in Europe. Nobody can be forced to publicly show their private conversations. Only the authorities can ask for them in the case of a trial, if a judge gives the authorization. > but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. That's a non sequitur. The law is not about "surrender your private communications", first of all because E2E it's about secrecy, not privacy, privacy still exists without secrecy, and even if it was, Von der Leyen (that I dislike, to use an euphemism) would be subject to it too. The real World does not work like Gotham City.

Barrin92 4y ago

Legal documents aren't complicated because some cabal of evil lawyers has decided to make the text hard to understand for you, they're complicated because legal concepts require precision and specificity that ordinary language isn't able to express. It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehension of an 8th grader, if deception was the goal they'd hardly need to try that hard. EU documents are complicated because more than two-dozen national governments and thousands of people work on these texts because they can't ever agree on anything without throwing in 500 exceptions for each country, it's that simple, there's no tinfoil conspiracy.

geysersam 4y ago
It's interesting to think about how perhaps some ideas from software and programming language theory could be applied in legal settings. The requirements are quite similar. Unambiguous interpretation of precisely defined concepts. Particularly, it might allow much more efficient searching in legal texts. Imagine automatically searching for inconsistencies/loopholes or other "bugs" in the legal system. I'm reminded of the "oops I wrote a compiler" meme reding your comment about legalese requiring "precision and specificity ordinary language is not able to express".