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This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks. In reality, laws are
by tsimionescu 3y ago
This is quite a misunderstanding of how the law actually works, probably enhanced by lots of lawyer TV emphasizing obscure wording tricks.
In reality, laws are already written in a relatively normal language, and the words almost always mean exactly what they mean in plain English. The only problem is that the legal concepts they describe are themselves complex, and often they end up in a tangle of references to other laws and regulations and legal precedent etc.
- actuallyalys 3y agoI think this is a big part of it. My sense (as a non-lawyer who has looked at a fair number of laws and contracts) is that, in addition, there are plenty of laws and contracts that are just poorly written and wording or constructions that lawyers have retained out of caution or traditionalism. This last case, traditionalism and caution, is maybe a special case of the other cases, but it's not always obvious.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI believe that another thing that happens, and it is common in every field, is that certain constructions are very common within the field, and so the need arises among practitioners to shorten them. Most domains invent new words, but this doesn't work for laws and contracts (since they need to at least in principle be understandable to non-practitioners, such as most elected officials). So instead of full-on jargon, legal texts get enshrined phrases, which practitioners can essentially skip over, but which also retain some meaning in plain English (though often sounding antiquated).
- pydry 3y agoI worked for a company that translated certain kinds of legal contract into what was effectively a DSL. They could then be represented in a simplified way. That was the whole business. The CEO (a lawyer) claimed that the lawyers who wrote these things would deliberately and unnecesarily overcomplicate them so that they could maximize billable hours. I think they could quite easily have been templated using a DSL but that DSL would need frequent maintenance. These types of contracts did evolve as new types of clauses and legal constructs popped up and gradually evolved from "new" to "standard" to "boilerplate".
- tsimionescu 3y agoThe text of a contract can either be long and very explicit, or short but full of implicit assumptions. A DSL is the second kind: you encode those assumptions I the structure of the DSL and the text as written is based on all of those assumptions. The problem than becomes that anyone who wants to understand the contract now has to read not just the contract as written, but also all of the definition of the DSL itself. This can actually be OK if the DSL is very commonly used, such as a DSL for contracts between two parties which sign new contracts every day. But it is a huge waste of time for parties which rarely sign contacts, and is often used as an explicit moat to keep laymen from participating. If I give you a contract to sign that isn't even written in plain English, you will have no choice but to hire a lawyer specialized in understanding this contract DSL to advocate for you. I imagine (savvy) lawyers actually love DSLs that purport to make contracts concise.
- willsoon 3y ago[dead]
- chromoblob 3y agoIf you can't read documents in whatever form for their legal meaning, you can't work around the need for a lawyer. The DSL may be defined in comprehensible enough language and texts in it may be interpretable easily enough; but the method of contract is determined by agreement of its parties (inside the bounds set by law).
- tsimionescu 3y agoCurrently, contracts are judged by their meaning in plain English, with any additional definitions being stipulated in the contract itself (either explicitly or as part of the verbal agreements that accompanied the negotiation of the contract). A DSL is an extra layer of abstraction above that. If you agree to a contract written in some DSL, then you must also agree to the way that DSL translates into plain English. To significantly compress a legal contract that is not deliberately written to obfuscate its meaning, the DSL has to pack a lot of precise meanings into every term, making it very dense and hard to parse unless you're well-versed in it.
- anon291 3y agoA contract is anything two parties agree to with some consideration (benefit) exchanged. The law does not distinguish between 'proper' contracts and informal ones (like a handshake) except a proper one may be quicker to execute. And this is a feature... You wouldn't want to force everyone to undertake the cost of developing highly specialized legal products just to do business.
- jeppester 3y agoI don't watch that kind of television much, but since I'm not a lawyer, my view of the world is probably too simplistic. Still I'd argue that normal language is very poor at handling that tangle of references. A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form. When I've read (Danish) laws, I've often thought that they would read better as if statements. It's not that I think those laws are written in legalese, it's that they are expressing logic in a suboptimal way. Like how "four plus four equals eight" is a suboptimal way to express what could be expressed with 4+4=8.
- tsimionescu 3y ago> A good programming language would make those references very easy to untangle and present in their untangled form. Not necessarily. Notation can only do so much to help with understanding. To understand 4+4=8 you still need to understand what's a number, what addition means, and what it means for two numbers to be equal. The same problem applies to the law, and it takes far more time to understand legal concepts than the actual wording. Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for. The law is decided on by, and applies to, people who are not and have no reason to become legal experts. It is simply a statement of the rules by which we try to live. If laws were written in code, they would actually become much, much harder to understand than they already are for the vast majority of their audience. Imagine a public debate about a law where the text of the law was, instead of plain(ish) English, Haskell code. Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for loop.
- jeppester 3y ago> Additionally, the law is not supposed to be some arcane discipline that you need to learn a new language for. It would seem to me that reading laws has become an arcane discipline, partly due to it being expressed in a language with overly long sentences, which handles branches and references very poorly from a readability perspective. > Imagine news anchors explaining that Biden agreed to add the lambda sign, but was heavily criticized by McConnell for his use of a monad instead of a plain for loop. While that would surely be interesting to watch, I think we both know that's not what would happen. Like I wouldn't ask you "number four plus sign number four equal sign X?"
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThe words almost always mean almost exactly what they mean in plain English. That’s why the law is a huge mess. As a fun exercises, try to find how many definitions of “child” there are in the US law and how many times it’s used undefined.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI don't agree that the law is a huge mess. It is certainly far less of a mess than any code base I've ever seen, given the gigantic scope of what it applies to, and how many people if affects. Note that the legal system is indeed a huge mess, but that happens because of many other reasons - not a problem with the wording or vagueness of the law, but with the explicit (malicious) intentions of law-makers, judges, police and others involved in the whole process. For your example of "child": how often does it actually cause a problem in practice? How many people have been improperly punsihed/set free because of a poor interpretation of the word "child" in a specific law? This is far more relevant than every law taking up valuable space to define what such a common word means.
- sheepscreek 3y ago> ..and how many times it’s used undefined This is the real advantage of codifying law into a programming language. You can have validation and assertion that is automated. And a strict structure, free from ambiguity. As an additional advantage, multilingualism becomes more accessible, with the codified program/definition acting as the lingua franca of law. Thus, someone who only knows English could make sense of Japanese laws by reading it.
- tsimionescu 3y agoWhy would you want every law that applies to children to explain what a child is? Why stop at child, perhaps each law should include a definition of every word it contains, right? That would certainly make every law much more readable for the masses. The text of the law is meant to be understood by the people that it applies to, i.e. everyone living in the locality which passed said law. Expressing law in a formal language goes directly against that goal. Imagine if a EULA you get presented with, instead of being a wall of repetitive text, would be a wall of code with symbols you at best remember from some class you took in 8th grade.
- da39a3ee 3y agoI don't know if what you say about laws is correct, but it's certainly not a correct description of contracts. The general public is constantly confronted with utterly unreasonable legal documents: far too long, far too unclear, far too complex. The lawyers writing these, and the entities paying them, both know that the public will never read or understand them. It's pure cinicism.
- tsimionescu 3y agoSure, but that wouldn't change if they were written in code. It would probably get much worse, in fact.
- da39a3ee 3y agoI don't think so. Any state progressive enough to adopt law-as-code might also put in place laws limiting the length and complexity of the code. It would be easier to control this aspect as code I believe.
- tsimionescu 3y agoBy that same token, any state progressive enough to think about law-as-code might first put in place measures to limit the length and complexity of contracts written in plain language as well. The problem here is the length and complexity, not the language used to express the contract. And note that law-as-code would necessarily mean that a layman is fully unable to understand a contract (or the text of a law) at all. They would be fully reliant on a specialized worker to explain the code to them in plain English. Current contracts, if you have the patience to read and map them in full, are fully understandable by anyone with a good knowledge of the English language.
- gorenb 3y agoAs someone who has tried to read the Black’s law dictionary once, I must tell you that the law does use a lot of formal language.
- tsimionescu 3y agoIt does, to some extent, but it's still much closer to natural language than code. Expressing the law in code would turn this dial up to 11 and then some.
- kmoser 3y agoSure, but there would be all manner of services that could automatically translate law-in-code to any human language you wanted. The best part is that you could easily and automatically translate a law into, say, English, Japanese, and German. Whenever the law-in-code source changes, just rerun your translator and voila: no human intervention required (meaning faster and more accurate translations of the law into human-readable language). You could even program the "law-in-code-to-humanspeak" translator to generate different levels of the target languages, e.g. translate into something at a 6th grade reading level vs. something at a grad school level. Again, the advantage would be the automaticity.
- tsimionescu 3y agoBut now instead of reading the laws that govern my life myself and understanding them, I have to rely on some third party to explain to me what laws my representatives are voting on.
- kmoser 3y agoThe government who writes the coded law could be required to provide freely available services that translates those laws into plain language.
- MichaelDickens 3y agoIANAL but from my experience reading laws, they're written in a way that looks like it's trying to replicate programming-language-esque nested logic, but in prose format—instead of using physical layout to establish the relationships between concepts, they use words, which I find more confusing. I would rather read laws written in a more structured format.
- OJFord 3y agoYou (as a software engineer or similar) have been trained to read the 'more structured format' you'd prefer; lawyers have been trained to read 'prose'. Don't get me wrong I'd prefer it too, I just recognise it's a consequence of my own education and experience, and if we somehow flipped the switch overnight most lawyers would be completely baffled and pining for the much clearer old way.
- sjy 3y agoThe US Code is divided into numbered titles, sections, paragraphs and subparagraphs which can link to and incorporate each other by reference. This tree structure is reflected in typographic conventions which visually distinguish operative provisions from headings, indices and editorial notes. Isn't this the same kind of "structured format" as a code repository made up of libraries, modules, source files and functions?
- anon291 3y agoIf you read almost any state or federal statute, it's usually presented online in a tree format where definitions link to the defining article and referenced articles are hyperlinks to those sections. It's all very readable.
- gilcot 3y agoBut all structured format use words, and they're many programming language that are prose since COBOL. No one want to write laws in APL or assembly like.
- gilcot 3y agoCatala has similar goal than OpenEdge ABL[1] which is prose also. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEdge_Advanced_Business_Lan...
- from 3y agoThen you should be able to tell us what defrauding someone of their intangible right of honest services encompasses :)
- post-it 3y agoWhatever statute you're looking at likely defines "intangible right of honest services" and "defrauding."
- from 3y ago> For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services. That's it.
- tsimionescu 3y agoIs that supposed to be very complex legal language? I'm not sure if this is some reference I'm missing, but it sounds relatively simple to me: it seems to be an accusation that someone is providing services dis-honestly (i.e. hiding some aspect of how the service will be performed or how much it will cost). The full scope of what that encompasses is very hard to know, as it depends on essentially every other regulation and common law practice and precedent that applies in the particular legal jurisdiction (and which jurisdiction that is can itself be a somewhat thorny issue). But this problem isn't solvable by code. It's part of the intrinsic complexity of the legal system.