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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 yo
by 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§ionNum=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 agoThat's not a good example of legalese.
- akira2501 2y agoIt'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 agoI 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.