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I 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 law

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    If 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 ago
      Currently, 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.
  - pydry 3y ago
    That's absolutely not correct. A DSL is not necessarily short and implicit. It can be very implicit or very explicit and the one I worked on was explicit. Its defining feature would be that it is straitjacketed. The customers in our case did not actually look at the DSL - it was entirely internal. We decompiled the legal document into the DSL so that we could then represent the contract in more understandable ways.
anon291 3y ago
A 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.

tsimionescu 3y ago

I 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 ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    Currently, 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.
- pydry 3y ago
  That's absolutely not correct. A DSL is not necessarily short and implicit. It can be very implicit or very explicit and the one I worked on was explicit. Its defining feature would be that it is straitjacketed. The customers in our case did not actually look at the DSL - it was entirely internal. We decompiled the legal document into the DSL so that we could then represent the contract in more understandable ways.

anon291 3y ago

A 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.