18 ms·

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

• awinter-py 2y ago
  unwillingness to use parens scheme is the true legalese
• alekratz 2y ago
  I always thought it was because it needed to be rigid and specific.
• akira2501 2y ago
  I find nothing particularly incomprehensible about laws in general. In an experiment where you ask a bunch of amateurs to write legal documents I'm not sure you can apply any real interpretation to those results. They use the example of DUI laws. Here's two. There's nothing particularly complicated about them, and the "center embedding," to the extent it is present, is entirely comprehensible. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=23152 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/169a.20 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/169a.20 Particularly clear both to the layman and to officers of the court.
  • ilaksh 2y ago
    That's not a good example of legalese.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      It's one of the examples presented in their article, I did not pick it at random. Perhaps when people without subject matter experience write laws or contracts they end up as the paper suggests, but when people understand the problem domain clearly, the laws end up on paper with equal clarity. The paper notices the fact but draws the completely wrong conclusions.
  • graemep 2y ago
    I have looked up multiple British laws over a wide range of areas (from landlord and tenant to education to corporate) for practical purposes and it is mostly reasonably simply written given the need for precision and to cover edge cases. The article says "researchers plan to analyze British laws to see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction." Not in the last half century or so. I cannot recall having read any older legislation recently.
• ma2rten 2y ago
  The study seemed not very convincing to me, at least the way it was described in the article. To summarize: they asked crowdworkers to write a law who used legalese, but not when writing news stories about it or when explaining the law. From that the researchers concluded that people use legalese to convey authority. But what if people just imitated the writing style of existing laws, but not with the intention to make it authoritative but because that is what they understood their task to be?
  • District5524 2y ago
    I agree. Building on 200 Prolific answers and inventing names for their "own hypothesis" called "magic spell"? Odd. Lawyers have written like entire libraries on this subject, there are specialized journals examining the legal language used (e.g. in English: https://link.springer.com/journal/11196 https://link.springer.com/journal/11196, https://www.languageandlaw.eu/jll https://www.languageandlaw.eu/jll, but there are probably separate journals for this in every language with 10M+ speakers, like https://joginyelv.hu/ https://joginyelv.hu/) I understand this is not about the lawyers' approach to the problem, even if the author has a law degree, but a "cognitive sciences" department trying their hands on a problem that is new for them. But it would have been helpful if they had at least attempted to provide a reference to some prior art in the legal field...
• OutOfHere 2y ago
  It keeps the legal industry in business, at least until GPT came along.
  • CJefferson 2y ago
    The soverign citizen movement loves GPT, they are using it to find all kinds of loopholes in laws, I'm sure exactly zero of them will stand up in court.
    • mdaniel 2y ago
      As a counterpoint, and very slight argument for 'code is law', it seems at least nowadays that there isn't just one 'court' for it to stand up in. It depends a great deal on which specific judge one gets randomly (or district shops for). I am open to the rebuttal of "well that's what appellate courts are for" but chasing all these appeals is an expensive endeavor
    • jandrese 2y ago
      > I'm sure exactly zero of them will stand up in court. How is this any different than any other Sovereign Citizen legal argument?
  • goatlover 2y ago
    Is there any reason to think the legal industry has been automated and is no longer "in business"?
• keepamovin 2y ago
  This was my favorite part: Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude. But also the idea of distance to create authority is interesting. In symbols through history, power lives behind the veil: in the veiled faces of monarchs, in the secrets, in their 'inaccessibility' to 'commoners'. As if these walls create something that would perhaps otherwise not exist? Interesting :)
• never_inline 2y ago
  How is it much different from RFCs?
• efitz 2y ago
  I think that all kinds of jargon and style canons (like using latex for academic papers or the special unwritten rules for formatting movie scripts) are primarily an in-group/out-group mechanism. By communicating in the “expected” way, you are communicating that you are part of the in group. As a side note, writing for a broad audience is harder than writing stylistically. You have to not only understand all the concepts involved, but you have to be able to accurately convey those concepts in simple sentences without the use of jargon. I believe this is a rare skill. In academia, for the last few years there has been a push for Plain Language Summaries (PLS) as an accompaniment to traditional abstracts. This is a step in the right direction IMO, because many people don’t even bother reading the paper, or give up quickly, if it’s overly obtuse. Law could take a lesson from this.
  • max_ 2y ago
    This is my experience when studying material on cryptography. You need a cryptography library implementation for language X: - Crypto implementation for language X doesn't exist - You try to read papers defining the crypto scheme.And they use variables like K and phrases like "oh this is from the group G" - You spend weeks trying to understand what G and K are. - You finally implement the crypto algorithm in language X Academic cryptographers that write papers and no code: Only "academic cryptographers" have the right to implement crypto schemes. It's very frustrating working on cryptography schemes in obscure languages and their are no ready libraries. And reading original papers often feels like there is alot of proactive gate keeping.
    • tcoff91 2y ago
      Most of the time, obscure language can call out to C. Therefore you should almost certainly just use FFI and leverage a C implementation of whatever crypto algorithm you want to leverage.
      • max_ 2y ago
        Well, that's a possible solution. But often FFIs pollute the reason one chooses to use obscure languages.
• mvkel 2y ago
  Laws are not written incomprehensibly at all. They use terms of art wherever possible, to reduce the need for interpretability in the future. For example, "best efforts" and "reasonable efforts" have specific legal and can't be used interchangeably. When companies create "plain English" versions of their tos, they're introducing a bunch of unnecessary exposure without realizing it
  • sosuke 2y ago
    It’s awesome they try to define those terms. But I wouldn’t call that well defined at all. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6a4c20dc-594d-4756-b710-7a2dc213e8c0 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6a4c20dc-594d... I would say that math is unambiguous. Measurements are becoming more unambiguous. The accepted measurement of a kilogram equalling s Avogadro’s constant. Something like the number of silicon atoms in a 93mm sphere? But the definitions of best and reasonable are only accepted based off precedent and we’ve seen in recent history precedent in law isn’t as reliable or defined as we may have thought. Is there any language or any level of language that can remain defined across time and culture? So long as legalese requires interpretation to determine intent and outcome it can be expected be incomprehensible.
• 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  Tax contracts by character length. The longer and more complex the contract, the greater the burden of enforcement by the state. Since long and impenetrable contracts impose a cost on the court system, they should be taxed. If no "contract registration tax" is paid at the time the contract is signed, the contract should be considered null and void. Contracts could still be kept secret under this scheme. Register the SHA256 hash of the contract, alongside its length in characters, in a government database. One welcome effect of such a tax: You'd eliminate, or greatly abbreviate, those long EULAs whenever you sign up for an online service. I don't think legalese is actually useful, I think it's just a bad habit.
  • akoboldfrying 2y ago
    I love this! The rationale too. I wonder if people would try to get around length limits by referring to other, existing contracts or clauses. Would we wind up with npm, but for contracts? We'd want to have certain well-chosen "primitives" defined, at least. What a "person" is, etc.
    • 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
      Yep, sounds great. How about a EULA that just consists of a few icons representing standard legal statements about what the corp will do with my data?
  • whatshisface 2y ago
    The most expensive court cases aren't over clearly written contracts that have a clause for the dispute, they're over ambiguous ones. Contracts are written to minimize costs already, and that's why they're long. Legal cases are often much more expensive for the parties than they are for the US (you could have a dozen lawyers on each side plus staff, and one judge). The existing incentives favor minimizing the amount of time spend in a courtroom. A sign that this is working is that breach of contract doesn't show up in the supreme court very often. The big legal battles involving major corporations are usually regulatory, copyright or patent disputes wherein the parties were opposed even before the thing the case is about happened.
• andrewhillman 2y ago
  I was reading old law school book last year and it literally said it’s written the way it is because lawyers were being paid by the word way back when.
  • mdaniel 2y ago
    it seems you have submitted twice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42438850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42438850
• andrewhillman 2y ago
  I was reading an old history of law book last year and the reason was that lawyers got paid by the word back in the day. Then they were paid by the sentence, paragraph and page.
• tonymet 2y ago
  Ironic that a cryptic study says what we already knew
• calf 2y ago
  Why did they only have the 2 hypotheses, the "copy paste" and the "magic spell"? I would think a 3rd hypothesis is that a legal document is trying combine two incompatible cognitive modes, natural language and logical rigor, so arising this convoluted spaghetti style. Their experiment would not test for this possibility, since storytelling is inherently unrigorous.
• QuadrupleA 2y ago
  Gratifying to see this, I really hope it goes somewhere. Legalese is plain bad writing, needlessly so, and a steady drain on society. Interestingly there's a similar thing in police-speak, where things like "they were driving fast" become "the individual in question was traveling at a high rate of speed." Sort of casts a "magic spell" of seriousness and authority.
• openrisk 2y ago
  At least some (sections of) legal documents are incomprehensible because they refuse (probably for legal reasons mind you :-) to use mathematical notation. In a sense the need to keep them accessible to a generally but not mathematically literate audience is precisely what turns them incomprehensible. Describing logical and mathematical relations in words is taxing the reader, thats why these notations where invented! A related but different issue applies to any form of supporting visual explanation, despite the lack of a cognitivive barrier (nb: assuming accessibility). The word must be the beginning and the end, otherwise it opens the door for disputes.
• actuallyalys 2y ago
  I’m not sure any one factor “explains” why something is written in a particular way. History, practical concerns, conveying the tone and register, signaling, and official requirements all play a part. Still, it wouldn’t shock me if legal language is an unusual in how much of its incomprehensibility is explained by the “magic spell” hypothesis. Looking at the full text of the article, much of the analysis involves center embedding, which makes me wonder whether other features that contribute to complexity work the same way. Full text: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publication/383233336_Even_laypeople_use_legalese/links/66ccbf1c97265406eab0818a/Even-laypeople-use-legalese.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publica...
• XorNot 2y ago
  This seems like an atrociously underpowered study. The issue of non-lawyers just cargo culting the legalese style aside, did they try to actually interrogate whether the plain text descriptions held up to adversarial interpretation? Like take the plain text, hand it to a lawyer with a test case description and let them shoot holes in it.
• miffy900 2y ago
  I think their study is flawed as it ignores what I think is the biggest reason: and that's the courts, or specifically judges. There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings have influenced what is the acceptable wording to enforce whatever it is legislators intended for a particular law. When judges render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that itself is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity, over time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more exact wording. This is reflected in the tendency for judges to fall in groups that favour one way of interpretation over another, like Intentionalism, Purposivism, Textualism etc. The fact that statutory construction is something that is almost exclusively driven by judges themselves seems also pretty important when studying the language of the law and it's kind of absurd they ignore it in this study.
  • DoingIsLearning 2y ago
    > There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings have influenced what is the acceptable wording ... When judges render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that itself is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity, over time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more exact wording. Anglosphere applies Common Law but that is not the case across the rest of the world. It is very much a 'style' expectation irrespective of an attempt to precision (which it often lacks). I would even argue that Common law countries follow simpler legal language because of an inherent pragmatism when compared with Civil Law. If we look at the legal output from countries that directly or indirectly are influenced by old 'cathedra' university heritages (old French, Italian legacy or influence) it is far more convoluted IMO.
• missing-acumen 2y ago
  I often think that people saying others make things purposefully obscure to gain/retain legitimacy fail to recognize that any long standing field, be it in science or humanities, is inherently complex, due to its long evolved jargon and set of norms. Still, I am aware of cases where complexity has been used as a mean of power. Some languages have for instance baked in orthographic nuances and difficult grammar rules doing just that. It would be interesting to measure the extent to which we can cut some of the complexity we find in such examples. I suspect not much, both for reasons of culture and power.
• stratocumulus0 2y ago
  I've identified a specific style of speech in my native language that is used by less educated people trying to sound formal. It involves as many official or legalese-sounding terms a layman could come across, intertwined with "formal" grammatical constructs, many of which are incorrect, but which managed to spread virally. It's the kind of tone that you will find in a private message sent by a stranger who got angry with you on social media and tries to intimidate you with vague legal steps or something that you find in a complaint to customer service. Similar stuff going on with religion - the religious texts are all translated to sound vaguely archaic, but still comprehensible (the most common Bible translation here dates to the 1960s). This gives a feel that there's something serious going on.
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    God, I'm terrified of giving off exactly these vibes when trying to write a formal email in a language that I'm not very fluent in.
• BartjeD 2y ago
  The real story is that amateurs mimic legal form language to borrow its authority. The reality is mixed. Many legal terms have fixed meanings. But many expressions don't, and could be simplified. Students learn to write that way because their source material is like that. And because they want to appear knowledgeable.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  Many people here are claiming that it has to try to do with being unambiguously expressive, but many laws are excessively verbose, largely incomprehensible, and still extremely ambiguous, most often in sections that constrain the scope of a law. By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation, the Constitution's Bill of Rights, are generally just a sentence or two - and that works just fine. In my ever cynical opinion it's largely just a means of accumulating power without accountability. For instance in the terms and conditions of basically all major software now a days it says little more than "You forfeit all rights, we reserve any and all rights imaginable, and we can change this whenever want." But if it actually said this then people might be inclined to say 'hey that's not cool.' But when it's instead wrapped in page after page of incomprehensible legalese, people don't even bother trying to see what they're agreeing to.
  • afiori 2y ago
    I think that it is more about working around limitations, a TOS saying "I can do whatever I want, you cannot" might not hold on the basis of being too general, so you list all the areas where you can do whatever you want. Also if by law the user has some rights sometimes you might want to be careful to avoid contradicting them. Overall the cost of adding another paragraph is fixed and negligible and the possible gain in loss prevention is considerable
  • pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation, the Constitution's Bill of Rights, are generally just a sentence or two - and that works just fine. I don't think that's an accurate representation of the Constitution. I'd that we've seen clear examples of when the plain language of even the first two amendments has not worked just fine, and resulted in harm and litigation all the way to the Supreme Court.
    • ffk 2y ago
      Since the 90s, New Zealand laws have been written in clear, modern, accessible English. The end result is the broader population understands it more and can also reason about it while it’s up for debate before being passed. I think the ambiguity in the first two amendments has to do more with the specific text rather than plain English itself being deficient.
• anigbrowl 2y ago
  There's a simpler explanation. Legislative drafting is a low-status legal job in the USA. In the K, traditionally only the best new law graduates are considered for legislative drafting, official rulemaking and so on. In the US, politics is a destination for lawyers who can't qualify for prestigious corporate or judicial appointments. Legislative language doesn't have to be this way, but Americans are weirdly impressed by prolixity, and love writing phrases like 'in order to' instead of just 'to', or 'at this time' instead of 'now.' Also the American legal code is horrendously overgrown (not comparing it to other countries here, just on its own terms). Plato warned that when laws are so many and complex as to be incomprehensible to the average person, tyrants would exploit the resulting disillusionment with law to the detriment of the public.
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  I convinced myself that it is a semi-conscious effort to justify their existence and fees. Everyone interacts with law at some point, it is unavoidable. And since legalese can be impenetrable, you just have to hire a lawyer. This bakes in their societal necessity and guarantees fees for lawyers if all kinds.
• tivert 2y ago
  > In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes. > ... > “When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-embedding in either case,” Martinez says. How can such a study explain "why" legal documents "are written in an incomprehensible style?" Seems to me it would only tell you that legal documents conventionally have a particular style that even laymen are aware of an know how to mimic. If you wanted to get at the "why," I'd think you'd need to do historical analysis and talk to and test lawyers instead of laymen.
  • WickyNilliams 2y ago
    Thank you, I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger point of discussion. The whole methodology and the conclusions drawn are dubious at best. I guess most people didn't read the article!
• timonoko 2y ago
  Problem with extended programming language called English is that it has no "modes", and you have to use weird words and exotic intonation to have desired effect. Particularly OJSimpson's lawyer comes to mind, comical even those of us who barely knoweth the language.
  • DanielHB 2y ago
    So like C++?
• dvh 2y ago
  I once asked on free law advice website how do I find if certain paragraph of certain law is still in effect (i.e. was not overridden by newer law) and the lawyer just didn't understand what I want. I think he couldn't comprehend that someone would just want to point at a paragraph and asks "is this still a law?" As a programmer this seems like essential information to know, right? In code I can write "asdf" on the line and if it's still used it fails to compile or throws a runtime error but in law there is no such thing. And there is no incentive to simplify it.
  • pavel_lishin 2y ago
    I'm going to throw out the worst analogy I'll probably ever make: The law is written in higher-level languages, and the courts are the compilers. It's just that most written laws probably never go through the compilation stage, until it becomes a problem for someone.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Isn't that what law codification is? It assembles and organizes all the laws, removing anything that has been repealed. So if you're looking at a codified version, then you know it hasn't been repealed as of its publication. I don't know how often the codified versions get updated, and therefore how long of a lag there can be. Any lawyers here?
    • showerst 2y ago
      NAL but I have written legal database software, and helped to get a few bills passed. Codified laws are "full" printings that include new laws that were passed, and laws that were explicitly repealed. This is not the whole scope though: perhaps a court opinion invalidated some law but the legislature hasn't gotten around to removing it. Or perhaps some new interpretation keeps means a law's applicability has changed (this happens a lot with laws that are pre-internet). Sometimes there are old laws that were superseded but never repealed due to obviousness: Laws allowing redlining, penalties for witchcraft, that sort of thing. Though that's more likely at the local level than state. Just looking up the laws on the books is not _that_ helpful to knowing is a specific part applies to you. PS: Laws are generally codified yearly in the US, except the feds who do it a few times a year. States have 'session laws' that are a running collection. These are a pain to 'merge' into the laws, hence Lexis and West having big budgets and large work forces doing it.
• smitty1e 2y ago
  Bureaucracy + poetry = "bureauetry"
• paulmooreparks 2y ago
  > “We thought it was plausible that what happens is you start with an initial draft that’s simple, and then later you think of all these other conditions that you want to include. And the idea is that once you’ve started, it’s much easier to center-embed that into the existing provision,” says Martinez, who is now a fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago Law School. Seems to me that's also how code bases become obfuscated after starting out cleanly.
• veeter 2y ago
  I always thought it was some kind of protectionist mechanism amongst the academic trades. Can't do your own taxes if you don't speak accounting, you have to pay somebody. Can't represent yourself in court if you can't even comprehend what's being said, either.
  • n144q 2y ago
    Probably not the best place for a programming joke, but here I am: This is exactly why I write code that nobody can understand. Can't get fired.
  • bitshiftfaced 2y ago
    That sounds plausible. You also see an abundance of center embedding in older philosophical works. In highschool I tried reading through these, and they way they write forces you to read slowly and constantly backtrack. I think you see it with more complex subject matter because you have more tangents shooting off. It means the writer needs to think ahead and do more mental work in order for the sentences to be read more easily. It was also more burdensome to edit your manuscript back then, so you had physical as well as mental friction.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • goatlover 2y ago
    Or it takes expertise to do anything sophisticated in those fields. Representing yourself is not a good idea because you probably don't have the courtroom experience arguing cases, and likely don't have an in depth understanding of the law.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    This was literally the case when we look at history surrounding Jim Crowe laws. They were purpose built to disenfranchise. You always have to wonder what the actual intent of a given law is. The incentive to work in an ulterior motive within the text is always going to be there. And we have not designed a system to be robust to that. Most we can do is attempt to pass yet another law that might rectify the “bad” one but that one itself might be filled with bullshit. Pork barrel politics is a real phenomenon and a side effect of our legal system.
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  In the future only advanced intelligence will understand the api governing human - computer - human - animal - human interactions.
• TriangleEdge 2y ago
  I always thought it was because of narcissism. I didn't see it as casting an authority spell over others.
• Finnucane 2y ago
  See also: Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
• DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
• renewiltord 2y ago
  I think laws are inherently hard to make comprehensible because of the edge-cases they have to capture. Try https://novehiclesinthepark.com/ https://novehiclesinthepark.com/ to see if you can come up with something that agrees with everyone. However, the style that people use in laws is mostly historical. Almost all of these are copy-paste jobs because they are trying to not deviate from existing language - which has the big advantage that it has been interpreted to mean a certain thing. Though I have to wonder what portion of these are really that and what portion are people's belief about this being the case. If we were to do it over, legalese would incorporate more programming language learnings. Center-embedding is obviously wrong, and I have seen more contracts use forward declaration by first defining terms and then using them. I think it's good that this study points out things like these and maybe we can improve them over time.
  • jordanpg 2y ago
    This is the best statement of the problem. A lot of folks on this thread are importing the idea from computers or math that there is a _right answer_ to expressing laws in written language. But this point of view ignores the vast diversity of human experience and variability that has to be governed using a few words. It is not the case that every possible edge and corner case can be anticipated ahead of time, and this would, in any event defeat the purpose of trying to make the law more clear. Maybe laws can be written more clearly or more succinctly in some cases, but the specific words, phrases, grammar, etc. chosen matter quite a lot in a common law jurisdiction. “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law
• empath75 2y ago
  Sometimes contracts and laws are often written ambiguously not accidentally, but because it's too the benefit of someone involved in the negotiation that it'll have to be sorted out later in court. Lawyers of course will say that they would prefer all contracts be clear and legible, and yet they don't write them that way, and I refuse to believe that it's just bad luck that every contract ends up being difficult to read and ambiguous. Everyone involved went to a good school and took a lot of classes about writing. Good lawyers love ambiguousness because that's where they earn their money. Obviously there's some clauses that everyone involved thinks need to be crystal clear, but it's not accidental that contracts are written in such a way that they admit several interpretations. If you read Matt Levine, you see examples of this intentional ambiguity being exploited by finance lawyers pretty frequently. https://archive.ph/tQhqB https://archive.ph/tQhqB is one example One way you can think about it is that ambiguity in contracts and laws is one more way that the powerful and wealthy can leverage that power against people who have less ability to hire good lawyers. A good lawyer will fight hard to make everyone they want clear and obvious, and everything they don't want vague and ambiguous, because they know they can abuse the legal system later to pick your pocket.
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  An AI that understands legal text and can reliably answer questions about it will rake in billions.
  • KittenInABox 2y ago
    The problem is that the reliable answers are unsatisfactory due to the ambiguity inherent in law. i.e. a lot of "maybe" or "it depends" or "probably". Maybe the specific judge is kind of a hardass that you're dealing with that day. Maybe the specific cop that pulled you over has a tendency not to show up in court and so you're more likely to get a default judgement, but not 100% because the cop could still show up.
    • BurningFrog 2y ago
      It's definitely a difficult problem, but it doesn't have to be perfect to be valuable. Human lawyers aren't perfect either. Most legal issues people have are have clear answers, and the AI should be err on the side of admitting it doesn't have a certain answer.
• GrantMoyer 2y ago
  Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right. I also think lawyers don't find it worth optimising the language much, because the target audience is other lawyers who know all the incantations anyway. The target audience is lawyers instead of laypeople, because the language isn't what matters in the first place. What matters is all the relevant case law, which can vary so much from the "obvious" or even "right" interpretaion of the written language, that a layperson not using a lawyer for all but the most trivial legal needs is a recipe for disaster.
  • dfxm12 2y ago
    Don't bad things happen anyway, via what we call "loopholes", et al? It seems like laws are sometimes written to be intentionally evaded by the lawyered class.
  • gosub100 2y ago
    The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary.
    • GrantMoyer 2y ago
      I've thought a lot about how absurd it is that the rules we must follow are so obtuse that an entire profession exists to advise and argue if we and others are following the rules. But I've come to believe we just live in an absurd reality, and there's no possible way to communicate a set of rules to everyone, or even to get everyone to agree to one set of rules in the first place, so the legal profession is an unfortunate necessity. Of course, that doesn't preclude lawyers from sometimes being unscrupulous.
      • gosub100 2y ago
        I think of case law as like a git repo of every function and subroutine anyone ever wrote. So on one hand it makes sense to need a specialized education to use it (so we don't waste time arguing the same noob points over and over). But on the other hand, you shouldn't need a law degree and bar license to sue an insurance company to pay up. Their client hit you, you're injured, now pay up or have a judge order you to. But the lawmen have carved out their own moat that puts ordinary people in a position to rely on them.
• crazygringo 2y ago
  > That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand. Can anyone provide an example sentence from a legal source with center embedding? Multiple examples, ideally? It is maddening that so much of the article is about this, but they refuse to actually show it to us.
  • sbelskie 2y ago
    > “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the ‘Total Payments’), would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.” > The paper offers this as a more understandable alternative, with the definition separated out: > “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’ This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof.” https://bcs.mit.edu/news/objection-no-one-can-understand-what-youre-saying https://bcs.mit.edu/news/objection-no-one-can-understand-wha...
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      Would note that when drafting contracts, this is extremely natural to do. You notice you’re reusing a concept and so define it at first mention. Or you write something and later notice an ambiguity. Speaking as a non-lawyer who drafts things from time to time (to be reviewed by a lawyer).
      • crazygringo 2y ago
        Indeed, I find the original to be less ambiguous. Why does the second version refer to payments and benefits in the first sentence, and then give them a name in the second sentence? In the revised version, I'm now very unclear whether Section 3a payments apply to the first sentence or not. The original makes it crystal-clear that they do; the revised version almost suggests they don't, since they were explicitly added to sentence 2 but not sentence 1.
• bux93 2y ago
  From the linked article, this particularly stands out: Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences. [..] “For some reason, legal texts are filled with these center-embedded structures,” Gibson says. “In normal language production, it’s not natural to either write like that or to speak like that.” - notice how there's a definition right in the middle of the article, and not at the beginning. Anyhow, there is a specific reason for having a definition not in chapter 1, article 1 (definitions) but somewhere down in article 15; lexical scope. That definition is not meant to be used in article 8 or 64, where the same word or phrase may be interpreted "as normal" (that is, still as a legal term, but not the one from article 5). This research seems to ignore that there are different styles of legal texts; you'll find that the civil code of any country is usually written in a different (more modern) style than the ancient "thou shalt not kill" bits of the penal code. Even if new crimes are added, those will be written in the same ye olde style, rather than an updated one (with definitions in chapter 1). Also, legal texts dealing with finance tend to be written in a different style from legal texts pertaining to consumer protection.
  • dylan604 2y ago
    Great, so definitions have scope applied to them. Sounds like definitions defined in chapter 1, article 1 are global while the lexical scope is just a local. We should force them to use the key word "let" in front of the term (or which ever equivalent for your favorite language).
  • Clamchop 2y ago
    > notice how theres a definition right in the middle of the article, and not at the beginning. The criticism is of sentence structure, not document structure. > That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding
• nabla9 2y ago
  One reason for the style is established meaning for phrases. Lawyers have phraseology that has very specific meaning in the context.
  • tux1968 2y ago
    That should be amenable to mechanical translation, even if perhaps it would need to be guided by the user a bit to confirm context. Since there are very specific meanings, they should each be equally expressible in less terse, but more understandable prose.
• sys32768 2y ago
  When I went toe-to-toe with a debt collector, I quickly discovered that many laws are vaguely written by lawyers to encourage litigation. The language in both the federal and state debt collection laws was so ambiguous that my research only lead me to consumer agencies saying I needed to ask an attorney. Or, I would find court cases where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove. I stood my ground with the debt collector on refusing to pay interest on medical debt after paying off said debt, but they never admitted I was right, and I am still baffled by their arguments that only an attorney could navigate.
  • Aachen 2y ago
    > where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove. It does not matter what the law says, you always have to litigate if you want to force another party to do what you want. If the law says it and they don't do it, you have to. If case law confirms it and they don't do it, you also have to. Commonly referred to as the 90% of the law: they have what's yours, but it's up to you to put in the effort to prove it and get anything back at all Judges never alter law made by the legislator, in any (trias politica) legal system that I know of (Netherlands mainly, but also what I read of UK law and friends), but in all of the aforementioned: the case law is an important aspect of your obligations and rights. One refers to it as basically equal to law, but it doesn't alter the law itself
    • bombcar 2y ago
      Judges at least in the USA can alter the law, in two ways: 1. They can determine the law does not apply 2. They can decide the law collides with another, higher ranking law and so does not apply Both don't really do anything unless the other judges start to agree with them, in which case people stop bringing the cases because they know they'll lose. The cost of fighting the case is almost always way more than the value of the case, so they'll avoid fighting it if the outcome is pretty well determined. This is one case where you have an advantage; you can defend yourself pro se (and likely lose) but the very cost of attacking your pro se defense is often way more than the value they get from you.
• jonahbenton 2y ago
  Seems completely mistaken and ignores work on declarative vs procedural writing, principles vs rules, etc. Minimizing cognitive load for the reader ("plain language") is useful in some cases and a complete mistake in others.
• WBrentWilliams 2y ago
  I'm not certain is if this is because I live in a city with a well-known law school, or if Lawrence Lessig dropped the idea into my thoughts first. The idea: The first duty of any court of law is to defend its own existence. My thesis is that this first duty colors in the rest of the legal profession, including why laws, orders, and proclamations are written in a certain way. Minor point: The article calls out in-place definitions. Useful, if unwieldly, when footnote and endnote conventions have yet to have been defined and practiced.
• robwwilliams 2y ago
  My favorite summary of this MIT press release us this three-word quote by the author: “we think maybe…”.
• bunderbunder 2y ago
  Here's a draft of the actual paper: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publication/383233336_Even_laypeople_use_legalese/links/66ccbf1c97265406eab0818a/Even-laypeople-use-legalese.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publica...
• reverendsteveii 2y ago
  I've been studying pseudo-legal theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudolaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudolaw) since before they were called pseudo-legal theories and when I first got into it I was calling it legal spellcasting for exactly this reason: people seem to think that because things with the force of law sound arcane and use a lot of old grammatical constructs that means that things that sound arcane and use a lot of old grammatical constructs are things with the force of law. The thing is, in a way they're right: there are certain phrases that carry legal force. "I am invoking my right to remain silent", "I don't consent to a search", "I want a lawyer", but not, and this is part of where it really starts to feel like spellcasting, "why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog" (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for-a-lawyer-dawg-judge-says-he-asked-for-a-lawyer-dog.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for...). It's an opaque system understood only by a learned few but with incredible bearing on everyday life for those outside the legal literati. There are magic words that, if invoked correctly, can thwart an army in their tracks and give you the power to compel people to carry out your will but if invoked incorrectly can lead to your utter destruction. Does that sound like sorcery to you? Because it does to a lot of people, and a lot of unscrupulous actors are writing and selling false grimoires to people that promise a set of magic words that will increase their power. "I'm not driving, I'm travelling" is a spell that will protect you from highwaymen who wish to extort you for using your car Put your index finger on the top of your head, spin around 3 times counterclockwise, say "I assert my natural personhood as a freeman-upon-the-land" and burn your driver's license. That's a ritual to avoid paying taxes. Of course none of it works. But it feels like things that work. Also our legal system is so inconsistent and there's so much leeway in what to charge and how to charge it that sometimes it does actually work, or at least seems to. So you read about the incantations that genuinely do work, then you read about the ones that people claim work and that will give you the legal equivalent to superpowers, then you get pulled over and try invoking your right to travel under the uniform commercial code as a sovereign citizen. The cop was gonna let you go anyway, you just had a blinker out, and now he's baffled by your bullshit and doesn't feel like dealing with it so he gives you a verbal warning and you go home thinking "Wow, I actually backed that cop down. This stuff does really work. Amazing."
• JackFr 2y ago
  Center embedding = lexical scoping for clauses which need to withstand adversarial interpretations.
• joshuaissac 2y ago
  So many words and not a single example. This research also seems to be a little bit shallow. There is a lot of existing scholarship on legal language (Legal English and Legal French in Anglophone countries, Juristische Fachsprache in German, etc.). Maybe the underlying paper addresses this already, but the article makes it seem as if this is all groundbreaking.
• notatoad 2y ago
  every time i have cause to go and check the text of a law in my country, i'm always a bit surprised about how understandable it actually is. there's the reputation for legalese, but, for example, this is perfectly legible to me, a person with no legal experience https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-21/page-2.html#h-397361 https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-21/page-2.html#h-...
• roughly 2y ago
  A friend described software engineering as wizardry, in the D&D 5E sense - you study the arcane systems that underpin the modern world, learn how they worked, and then learn how to manipulate them to affect the world in the way you want - and described lawyers as clerics: you learn how to appeal to the gods (courts, cops, the myriad powers of the state) to cause those powers to intercede on your behalf, mostly by learning the phrases and chants that impel those powers to act. (And I suppose in that taxonomy, sorcerers are the wealthy: either by birth or by some form of ritual they have gained a power that causes things in the world to happen the way they want them to.)
• JJMcJ 2y ago
  Two things a lawyer told me, in a social setting, not a consultation. 1. Legal terminology has specific meanings, sometimes going back hundreds of years, with a multitude of rulings to define that meaning. 2. If you aren't a lawyer, don't use lawyer language in a contract. Courts will interpret ambiguity against the drafter of the contract. Better to use normal language.
• croemer 2y ago
  Actual paper, not the press release: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405564121 Preprint via SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4933363 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4933363 One should generally avoid press releases as much as possible, they usually exaggerate.
• bparsons 2y ago
  Canadian laws are written in fairly plain language. This is partly for accessibility purposes, and partly because they must be duplicated in both French and English and mean exactly the same thing. Where laws and regulations get complicated is when they are referring to other documents. The Canadian Parliament has done a wonderful job creating a user interface for the different iterations of bills, and linking them to video and text of the debates and votes. https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bills https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bills
• jrm4 2y ago
  Is this going to be another one of those things where the tech people incorrectly believe that the law is broken because their brains are kind of incompatible with how law actually works? Legal writing is doing just fine. It's not anything like code nor can it be expected to be.
• sinkasapa 2y ago
  It seems like the central claim of the study is that there is an increased use of center embeddings in legal texts in comparison to non-legal texts and casuals peach. I'm seeing a lot of debating and presentations of opinions about various aspects of legalese in the comments, but the number of center embeddings in a document is measurable, and is in no way associated with clarity, or precision. It is known that beyond one or two center embeddings, most people find a sentence incomprehensible. There is no way that a sentence like "The dog the cat the rat chased ate saw the man wink." is more clear than some semi-paraphrase, which does not use center embeddings, such as "The rat chased the cat who ate the dog who saw the man wink." It seems reasonable that the only explanation the researchers could find for such behavior is that it seemed to have some sociological value in invoking authority. There is no sense in which center embeddings help to avoid lexical ambiguity. They are simply difficult to parse.
• sydbarrett74 2y ago
  One reason why legalese is so incomprehensible is because it has to cover all conceivable edge and corner cases explicitly. It rubs up against the limits of human language.
• LeroyRaz 2y ago
  As described, the research sounds weak. They have a hypothesis: "laws are written that way due to style imitation." And their proof of that hypnosis is to weakly reject an entirely different hypothesis "the magic spell hypothesis." Poor sloppy work. As likely to misleading as clarify.
• engineer_22 2y ago
  From the article: >In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes. >To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later. It's not clear from the description of the findings that the language participants used was to borrow authority ("magic incantation hypothesis"). In fact, any number of other conclusions could be reached.
• nsoonhui 2y ago
  I think here's where LLM can shine. Do you think that having LLM to digest and translate the incomprehensible laws will help people to understand them better?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  "That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences - a feature known as "center-embedding." Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand." This tendency toward "center-embedding" seems similar to the tendency of developers to use long function names with embedded descriptions. I find these names highly distracting and oftentimes cryptic. Not being a "developer", I would rather names be short, e.g., like Arthur Whitney makes them, so the code fits better on the page. Then, if necessary, place the descriptions of each function in a separate section or file. Meanwhile I have learned to tolerate developer tendencies. I like looking things up. Legal documents frequently have definitions in a separate section. In order to read a document it is necessary to refer to the definitions section. I have found that many businesspeople struggle with defined terms in legal documents. They often ignore that terms may be defined and fail to appreciate the siginifcance of the definitions.
• rayiner 2y ago
  At least on a quick reading, the study overlooks the adversarial nature of legal drafting. Laws and contracts are optimized to be quick to write while avoiding the constructions that are easy to attack. Put differently, it’s often an attempt to write defensively while being lazy. Center embedding—embedding a definition of a subject or object in the middle of a sentence—is hard to read but makes it harder to argue that a particular definition doesn’t apply to a particular sentence. For many hard to read constructions, you can probably achieve the same result in a way that’s easier to read while being just as hard to attack, but that might take more analysis during the writing.
• pro14 2y ago
  Section 1. Definitions (a) "Pedestrian" shall mean any natural person afoot or using a means of conveyance propelled by human power other than a bicycle, including but not limited to rollerskates, skateboards, or similar devices, or who is operating a wheelchair or other mobility device. (b) "Roadway" shall mean that portion of any street, highway, or other public thoroughfare improved, designed, or ordinarily used for vehicular travel. (c) "Crosswalk" shall mean: (1) That portion of a roadway distinctly indicated for pedestrian crossing by lines or other markings on the surface; or (2) In the absence of such markings, that portion of a roadway included within the prolongation or connection of the boundary lines of the adjacent sidewalk at intersections. (d) "Jaywalking" shall mean any unauthorized crossing of a roadway by a pedestrian, including but not limited to crossing at a location other than a crosswalk where such a crosswalk is provided, or crossing at a time or in a manner contrary to posted traffic control signals or lawful instructions of a peace officer or traffic control device. Section 2. Prohibition (a) It shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross any roadway at any point other than within a marked or unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, except as otherwise expressly authorized by law. (b) Where traffic control signals are in operation, it shall be unlawful for any pedestrian to enter or cross a roadway against such signals or contrary to the instructions of any authorized traffic control device or peace officer. Section 3. Exceptions Notwithstanding Section 2, the prohibitions set forth herein shall not apply to: (a) Any pedestrian acting in compliance with the lawful order, signal, or direction of a peace officer or other authorized official. (b) Any pedestrian who, due to an emergency or hazard, must cross at a point other than a designated crosswalk to avoid imminent harm, provided such crossing is effected with reasonable care and caution. Section 4. Penalties Any person found to be in violation of this ordinance shall be subject to a civil penalty of not more than [Amount] per offense, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction. Nothing herein shall preclude the imposition of additional sanctions as provided by law or the exercise of discretion by the issuing authority in accordance with applicable statutes and regulations. Section 5. Severability If any provision of this ordinance, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, shall be deemed invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, such invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this ordinance, which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this ordinance are hereby declared severable. Section 6. Effective Date This ordinance shall take effect on [Effective Date], and all acts or omissions occurring on or after such date shall be subject to its terms. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- SECTION 1. DEFINISHUNS ‘N DAT (a) "Pedestrian" be meanin’ any geezer on foot or rollin’ on them mad skates, blades, boards, or in a chair what goes slow, innit. (b) "Roadway" be that big bit o’ street where dem cars be cruisin’, not the sidewalk where you can chill wit’ your crew. (c) "Crosswalk" be them stripey bits what you see painted on da road, so peeps know where to cross like good boys ‘n girls. SECTION 2. NO DODGY CROSSIN’ (a) Hear dis: You is well not allowed to stroll, swagger, or roll across da street anywhere except those official crossin’ zones, ya get me? Don’t be thinkin’ you can just hop in front of them ridez wherever you want, aight? (b) If there’s lights flashin’ “Don’t Walk,” or a copper tellin’ you “Oi, stay put,” you best do what they say, ‘cos you ain’t special. Ignore ‘em, and you is well outta order. SECTION 3. EXCEPTIONS N’ STUFF (a) If a proper rozzer or traffic geezer says “Go,” then you can go, blud. Proper authoritay, innit. (b) If da place is on fire, zombies is about, or summin’ else mad dangerous is goin’ down, you can cross outside da lines if dat’s the only way to save ya pretty face. Use your noggin, yeah? SECTION 4. PUNISHMENT, BLUD If we catch you playin’ chicken with da traffic and doin’ da jaywalk bizness, you gonna get slapped wiv a fine (cash money, innit). How much dough you owe depends on what da big men in robes say, so don’t get cheecky. You pay up, show respeck, and walk off like a proper geezer next time. SECTION 5. SEVERABILITEY (BIG WORD, INNIT) If da judge says some bit of dis law is off its rocker, da rest still stands tall, bruv. No wigglin’ out just ‘cos one bit is messed up. SECTION 6. WHEN IT KICKS IN When we say so, you better watch dem feet. No mo’ crossin’ streets all willy-nilly. Safe? Safe.
• webspinner 2y ago
  Well, if you understand legislative language like me, they really aren't.
• hnfong 2y ago
  It’s simple really. Almost every software engineer strives to write code in a clear and concise manner. However, usually we produce a pile of spaghetti. Why is that? We all know why. Now, take those reasons and imagine you’re in this situation: You’re working on a codebase that has been around for 200+ years, you don’t fully understand the code you are editing, the requirements are somewhat vague (“i know it when i see it”), people calling the shots are demanding that you make ad-hoc exemptions for them for political reasons, the coding style guidelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and worst of all you cant compile the code and test whether it works, so you dry-run the scenarios in your head and hope you don’t miss any weird test cases.
• NoZZz 2y ago
  The presumption that law has pre-empted us from understanding it, is completely preposterous; Y'all should just admit that your mental capacity is beneath us glorious lawmakers! (yea no they're dumb as nails)
• Swizec 2y ago
  Is legalese not just the result of trying to use English as a programming language? Any time I try to write English (or other natlang) precisely and unambiguously and robust against adversarial interpretations, it comes out looking like legalese.
  • the_clarence 2y ago
    It's verbose english with a stubborn attitude against any kind of formatting. Maybe I'm part of the problem here. BRB.
  • bruce511 2y ago
    Natural language is indeed ambiguous. Words tend to vary in meaning from time to time. So legal documents gave to precisely define a lot of terms, and Latin is also used (because meanings there dont change.) Take the phrase "Open Source" as an example. Us old folk ascribe specific meaning to that term - typically based on the legalese in Open Source licenses. However the next generation have imbued it with their own (various) definitions. This leads to endless back and forth. For example I recently pointed out that SQLite is Public Donain, not Open Source. (With predictable pushback.) Today, in other thread someone claimed "its not really open Source unless its in git, and on github". And the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is seldom understood. So yeah, legal documents are gard to parse because they can't take "common meaning" for granted.
    • mdaniel 2y ago
      > "its not really open Source unless its in git, and on github". Heh, mine is even more strict: to me, it's not really open source unless I can build it since if I cannot compile the project, I cannot change it for my needs and/or send those tested changes back upstream I have a second 2nd level "requirement" about packaging it in a sane distribution format, because I don't think any reasonable person wants to have a .desktop file that is $(cd /home/src/foo; npx run whatever "$@"). I'm looking at you, Chromium, since I can get it to build just fine but count the number of hand-rolled /usr/bin/install calls https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b79516716b124ccfd53e901cf0e7/extra/chromium/PKGBUILD#L308-L375 https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b... because evidently the $(make DESTDIR= install) is just kidding