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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 o

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.
  - Enginerrrd 2y ago
    Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software. Laws are programs. In that context, does it really seem so absurd that the rules are "obtuse"? Many people feel that way when reading someone else's code, but that doesn't mean all the weird conditionals are unnecessary.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      The problem is that the output of the program determines if you’re going to jail. There are laws that many people might break just because they have no clue that there’s even a law about that. Realistically, you’re probably not going to go to jail immediately but you can have a bad time if you’re caught doing some things you didn’t even know were illegal.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software. I’ve done software (a lot) and worked in a legislative office (a little), they are extremely different. > Laws are programs. Laws are not programs, or even meaningfully analogous to anything so deterministic. They are more like, if we must make a computing analogy, components of prompt templates (other portions of which will be filled by evidence and…well, a bunch of other stuff you don’t control when writing the laws) that will be used by an extremely high temperature LLM. Which you can’t actually test freely against, though you can observe past behavior – but, even then, you are stymied by the fact that the LLM itself is constantly updated with retrained, and sometimes rearchitected, versions, without useful release notes.
      - unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
        No, law is code. It's just that the programming language is mushy-- 400 definitions of the word "set" is the example my AI offers-- and the interpreters vary. In a pinch, the code writers know that nearly anything they write can be rescued by the chief interpreter, which has led to a model of legislatures intentionally writing ambiguous code and top-level courts interpreting with an emphasis on public good. But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with remarkable precision and it becomes obvious again, law is code.
- coldtea 2y ago
  There are literally 1.33 million lawyers in the US...
  - SideQuark 2y ago
    And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable. Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs. I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
- fao_ 2y ago
  "(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary" I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!
  - gosub100 2y ago
    Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?
    - goatlover 2y ago
      Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?
      - gosub100 2y ago
        No, thats yet another cartel.
        fao_ 2y ago
        Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology. Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train. Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
HPsquared 2y ago
It's a lot like C++, come to think of it.
lenerdenator 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. If the American legal system is any indication, the vague, bad stuff is the desired outcome. It's amazing the regulations that the EU has where it says "no, do not do this", and not only do people generally not do it, the people who do get caught doing it are fined into oblivion for it. There's no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the law to get around something society clearly desired, because the court is going to do what society desired. Why, yes, I am talking about data privacy, but there are other examples.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the law to get around something society clearly desired, because the court is going to do what society desired Wat. I’ve literally seen tax laws in Germany and Sweden which could only possibly apply to one family. European law is in sans serif; that doesn’t mean it’s less convoluted than American law.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    It seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too You’re seriously arguing that the EU bureaucracy is streamlined and comprehensible without lawyers? Why do you think every rich person and powerful firm in Europe has fleets of lawyers?
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        I'm arguing that when court cases in the US are judged, the letter of the law (and thus all of that arcane language) matters more than the spirit of the law, while it seems to be the opposite in the EU for a lot of things.
coliveira 2y ago
That's not true at all. Law is written like it is because courts give a lot of importance to what is written and changes in these written forms have many possible consequences. This, combined with the fact that our judicial principles go very far back (starting already in ancient times with the Romans), makes it very inconvenient to change language and terms used.
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  This is correct. If 50 cases interpret and define the word "includes" in a contract, and you decide to use the word "comprises," you may end up burning time and money in court and negotiations.
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    Do engineering specifications use the same center embedded sentences as legal documents? IETF defines may, must, shall, etc. in every document but doesn't use the same format as law.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Law and technical standards are two places where language must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
        I have two different but reinforcing memories that support this. 1) I remember being in a Requirements Review meeting and spending an entire hour debating the meaning of a word. Don't remember the word, but it was something like "includes". 2) I separately remember being in a Requirements review for a feature that concluded successfully. Then later in a Design Review for that feature. And after that, Code and Unit Test reviews of the same feature. Then, months later, the feature was presented to the person who asked for it in the first place and then said, "that's not what I wanted. I wanted xxx instead." Yes, this person was at the Requirements and Design reviews!
LiquidSky 2y ago
New York attorney here. You're kind of getting it, though put in a silly way. It's not that "vague, bad stuff will happen" it's that, in common law jurisdictions at least, precedent controls. So if you use language that has been upheld for decades or even centuries you can be as confident as possible that whatever you're doing will also be upheld. Any novelty or variation introduces greater risk of a ruling against you. This naturally creates inertia and a conservative approach in legal practice.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Nah, it's all a gentlemen's agreement, given Roe vs Wade, if you want it enough you can bend it the way you want.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    On which end of Roe? The reasoning for the decision was sketchy, and Dobbs overthrew decades of case law.
    - wbl 2y ago
      All of the original case, and Kennedy's sweet mystery opinion in Casey, and then the transparently political overturning emphasize how political courts can be. I read some of the argument transcripts and usually it is a bunch of lawyers trying to sort out what the law should be given it works this way in this case and that way in that case and this one goes up the middle or the circuits disagree. But sometimes it is much more nakedly political.
      - mlinhares 2y ago
        Yeah, people often think there's some magical value to words, but they only have value in the political environment they sit in. If you decide not to enforce it, it doesn't exist, if you decide to over enforce it, everyone will think about it. It's all people's decisions, there's no magic about it.
- 2y ago
coldtea 2y ago
>Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia Careful past that Chesterton fence
dotancohen 2y ago
> What matters is all the relevant case law Not in all jurisdictions. And even in those places, the laws are often difficult to decipher. I think that the problem is trying to encode both intent and formal instructions in the same language. If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent. This would be especially helpful in e.g. criminal law, where ambiguities or oversights in language (e.g. with regard to women raping men) often lead to both innocent people sitting in jail, and guilty people going free.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent This is how American laws are usually written. Courts even venture into the debate records to discern intent.
  - dmoy 2y ago
    The intent bit in the laws is also is very brittle to changes in language. When the underlying words morph and mean different things, then hundreds of years later people kinda forget, and now we have a law that people think has a different intent. Similar to the way it's brittle when there are money numbers that don't include inflation (either on purpose or not), or (rarely) use a hilariously wrong inflation number instead of an index (say for a law passed during a time of very high inflation). Then the numbers change (or don't), and everything gets weird.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      This is why laws should sunset after some period of time, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. At that time they should be reviewed, debated again, and decisions made as to whether each law should be renewed as-is, revised, or (the default) allowed to lapse.
alexisread 2y ago
I think this is the crux of the problem, case law exists to help 'refine' and 'classify' a case ie. a crutch for an incomplete specification (the actual law). The 'workflow' is that the judgement on the current case informs the next ones and so on. I'd prefer it if previous cases had a bearing on rewriting/amending laws, rather than influencing a current case, and if the feeling is that a current judgement was not correct, rewrite/refine the law taking the case into account. That way a judgement does not require previous case research, this does mean that law needs to become a more well specified, and unambiguous language. We have decades of classification and computer language theory to draw from, and LLMs to stub-translate existing law, with exceptions going to a dead-letter-queue for individual appraisal. Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does someone know if they have broken it?
- hansvm 2y ago
  > Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does someone know if they have broken it? This is especially important in a world where precious few scenarios allow ignorance as a legal defense.
- kristianbrigman 2y ago
  I'd prefer to keep the separation of powers intact (legislature writes/modifies laws, judiciary can strike them down but can't (or isn't supposed to) make up law... the exchange is not that different between development and QA :) your process seems reasonable though.
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  That's called civil law and is used in almost all of Europe. Common law seems quite strange, nebulous and inefficient seen from a civil law continent.
- wbl 2y ago
  Congress can do this but chooses not to.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
escapecharacter 2y ago
I find there’s a similar hidden alternate semantic reality for business reviews. “Rustic” means the building is falling apart. “Bustling” means it’s impossible to find a seat. “Wholesome” means there’s no professional standards or consistency. It’s always an y in under-emphasis. It’s like two generations of reviewers ago, there were a bunch of defamation lawsuits and every reviewer has mimicked this style since.
taneq 2y ago
Much like systems code, right? :D (Mostly what I’m saying is that legalese is essentially natural(ish) language ‘software’ that has been developed and maintained over centuries by non-coders[1] and that most of the seemingly pointless or obtuse stuff is probably actually significant in weird edge cases.) [1] Not by any means saying that systems code is written by non-coders! But some of it is written by wizards and becomes Deep Magic that gets repeated by less eldrich contributors because if it isn’t then the authors sometimes meet a fiery doom.
- kristianbrigman 2y ago
  It's not _written_ by non-coders, but it is _used_ by non-coders who do not always follow the way you expect them to use it...
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> 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 both lawyers and laymen. Every lawyer and politician who claims that it is not worth optimizing this also claims that they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law. Tell this to every politican that if they don't work brutally hard on changing this fact they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law, and that they are thus (in the view of the ordinary citizen) working on to establish a arbitrary justice. Thus, they work on destroying (in the view of the ordinary constitutional state) on actively destroying the constitutional state. So, what makes these politicians and lawyers than differ from a despicable high traitor?
- QuercusMax 2y ago
  Half the politicians are lawyers, so it makes sense they'd want to protect their own interests.
mihaaly 2y ago
But the target audience is for laymen and not lawyers because we all have to abide the law and contracts and have to sign incomprehensive text that will have punishable consequence on us! How to obey the law/regulations/rules when you do not understand? My lawer should sign all my incomprehensible contracts and be punished for violations then, if the text is for them.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  The target audience isn’t laypeople. That’s why you have a right to legal representation. “Laypeople” language is way, way too ambiguous. Same reason you can’t write computer code in lay language. … there are consequences for lawyers if they fail to do this translation effectively…
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    If people really cared, law would have been written in Lojban. :P
  - mihaaly 2y ago
    I am sorry but law is for every citizen who has to obey it, so it is for everyone and everyone have to understand not only lawyers, are you sure you know what you are saying? There can be no lawyer at every time you do almost anything in life, be in traffic, raise children, participate in education, purchase something, travel, anything! Do you need an engineer sitting right next to you when you turn on the light or operate a vechicle? No! You need them for advanced things. If you argue that ALL law have to be understood only by lawyers then you are very very lost! What you have to obey, you have to understand! At least the relevant part (nuclear waste storage is perhaps not for you, I am just guessing), but even knowing which part is relevant you need to understand! Not enough lawyers to sit next to everyone guiding through everyday life that is regulated by law! It is difficult to understand because it made to sound ominous (fucked up for everyone), that's it, see the article. Form over essence. Also evolving without effort for restructuring so it becomes overcomplicated (see article). All formality over practicality and common sense, that's why it is so convoluted, or "it’s an accidental property", mimicing for centuries. Also don't mix up everyday language here used with friends over a beer that could be vague for outsiders - or themselves - but there ARE ways to be specific and understood with ordinary people too using the generic communication method law uses too: language. That could been used, that is being used in other areas in communicating towards layman (like doctors, I mean the smart ones, not engulfing you with latin explaining your condition and prognosis, right? Also instruction manuals for complex gadgets are not in ancient greek just for the sake of it, right, but ordinary and specific or even formal language that are still being understood by the ordinary consumer, as that is important.) Additionally: "Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.". I rest my case.
zo1 2y ago
My pet half-serious quip about laws/lawyers. Imagine writing a complex program without loops and functions, but you have access to C++ templates, and if statements can only be written as in-line switch statements that can't have any function calls. Oh and any "changes" to the code have to be done in the form of diff files that are included in the next program that may or may not be related. That's how laws are written.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
Another form of hilarious incantation in legalese are the way "patches" do work. There's a complete vocabulary and way to formulate sentences to, literally, apply patches to older texts. It's "diff" but for legal text, using natural language (well as much as legalese is natural). I don't know in english but in french you can definitely have a legal text (say for your company statuses) and then patches when you did modify things. Or you can have the "consolidated" text, which is the text with the patches already applied (it's definitely more of an easier read as there's no need to jump back and forth between the patches). And of course the patches can reference another legalese text, which itself can reference another legalese text. And all of these can have... Patches. These patches/revisions going out of their way to introduce a patching logic using natural language is plain weird. Besides these patches/revisions, I'd say the second most WTF legalese thing is that somehow, at some point, where there were already rules and laws governing what a person could and could not do, someone, somewhere (in Rome probably), decided that we could create new persons, but not physical persons: entities dealt with as if they were individuals. But virtual. I did set up a company: I created a person. And we do shareholders meetings and vote stuff and go in front of a notary and that notary comes up with revisions and we patch the person I created by sending the patches to the authorities. It's completely mindboggling.
- freejazz 2y ago
  You think its mindboggling that some laws refer to other laws? Really??
tetha 2y ago
Good laws should also "scale out" into unknown complexity and situations. For example, every german has a right to control pictures of their own self, and the way the law was worded, it already applied an idea on the legality of sharing/distributing deepfakes of regular citizens. However, this kind of generalization requires very careful wording. Every single word and every single statement will be examined for inclusion and exclusion of situations across many court cases. This means it's hard to formulate these laws. And then you rely on age-old, court- and battle-proven formulations... even if they are clunky and not intuitive.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  The scalability when further out sounds fundamentally like a coin-flip with future technologies, for if it makes sense or not. Three dimensional cameras of regular citizens being covered would be a hit. But what about misses, like say if artificial eyes became a norm would looking at someone technically be a violation under the law because you are technically recording them without permission even if it is just to a small operating buffer before it is passed to the optic nerve?
  - tetha 2y ago
    If we stay in this example - and I am neither Judge nor Lawyer, so I'm just a layperson: To be specific, every citizen has the right to control the distribution of their own image. Merely taking a picture is not illegal, except for certain areas of "highest privacy", like a bathroom in your home. It only becomes problematic if the picture is distributed. For example, this is why many concerts include waivers that you agree for your picture to be distributed in the context of this concert. Thus, an artificial eye recording -- and even recording to an SD card -- would be no problem. And that is how a good law should be written: It should be written with the rights, duties and protection of citizens involved so it allows the judges to make new technology fit into the framework of the rights of the people. And sure, it may fail at times. But that is what appeals and adjustments are for.
freejazz 2y ago
This is just dunning kruger effect
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
webspinner 2y ago
Well, here's how you come to understand it. You take the time to read filings, and follow trials. Trust me, it works!
justanotherjoe 2y ago
>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. Well to add to that, representing yourself is a really bad optics and you can't fervently defend yourselves. That's why even lawyers when put on trial will use other lawyers.
ted_bunny 2y ago
I worked in discovery. A lot of subpoenas still request microfiche and other formats that likely haven't been used in decades. Because there's that one clinic who still uses them who thinks "any and all records" must imply "except if you think of some convoluted exception"

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.
- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software. Laws are programs. In that context, does it really seem so absurd that the rules are "obtuse"? Many people feel that way when reading someone else's code, but that doesn't mean all the weird conditionals are unnecessary.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    The problem is that the output of the program determines if you’re going to jail. There are laws that many people might break just because they have no clue that there’s even a law about that. Realistically, you’re probably not going to go to jail immediately but you can have a bad time if you’re caught doing some things you didn’t even know were illegal.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software. I’ve done software (a lot) and worked in a legislative office (a little), they are extremely different. > Laws are programs. Laws are not programs, or even meaningfully analogous to anything so deterministic. They are more like, if we must make a computing analogy, components of prompt templates (other portions of which will be filled by evidence and…well, a bunch of other stuff you don’t control when writing the laws) that will be used by an extremely high temperature LLM. Which you can’t actually test freely against, though you can observe past behavior – but, even then, you are stymied by the fact that the LLM itself is constantly updated with retrained, and sometimes rearchitected, versions, without useful release notes.
    - unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
      No, law is code. It's just that the programming language is mushy-- 400 definitions of the word "set" is the example my AI offers-- and the interpreters vary. In a pinch, the code writers know that nearly anything they write can be rescued by the chief interpreter, which has led to a model of legislatures intentionally writing ambiguous code and top-level courts interpreting with an emphasis on public good. But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with remarkable precision and it becomes obvious again, law is code.
coldtea 2y ago
There are literally 1.33 million lawyers in the US...
- SideQuark 2y ago
  And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable. Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs. I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
fao_ 2y ago
"(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary" I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!
- gosub100 2y ago
  Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?
    - gosub100 2y ago
      No, thats yet another cartel.
      - fao_ 2y ago
        Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology. Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train. Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)

HPsquared 2y ago

It's a lot like C++, come to think of it.

lenerdenator 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. If the American legal system is any indication, the vague, bad stuff is the desired outcome. It's amazing the regulations that the EU has where it says "no, do not do this", and not only do people generally not do it, the people who do get caught doing it are fined into oblivion for it. There's no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the law to get around something society clearly desired, because the court is going to do what society desired. Why, yes, I am talking about data privacy, but there are other examples.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the law to get around something society clearly desired, because the court is going to do what society desired Wat. I’ve literally seen tax laws in Germany and Sweden which could only possibly apply to one family. European law is in sans serif; that doesn’t mean it’s less convoluted than American law.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  It seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too You’re seriously arguing that the EU bureaucracy is streamlined and comprehensible without lawyers? Why do you think every rich person and powerful firm in Europe has fleets of lawyers?
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      I'm arguing that when court cases in the US are judged, the letter of the law (and thus all of that arcane language) matters more than the spirit of the law, while it seems to be the opposite in the EU for a lot of things.

coliveira 2y ago

That's not true at all. Law is written like it is because courts give a lot of importance to what is written and changes in these written forms have many possible consequences. This, combined with the fact that our judicial principles go very far back (starting already in ancient times with the Romans), makes it very inconvenient to change language and terms used.

jimmydddd 2y ago
This is correct. If 50 cases interpret and define the word "includes" in a contract, and you decide to use the word "comprises," you may end up burning time and money in court and negotiations.
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  Do engineering specifications use the same center embedded sentences as legal documents? IETF defines may, must, shall, etc. in every document but doesn't use the same format as law.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Law and technical standards are two places where language must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      I have two different but reinforcing memories that support this. 1) I remember being in a Requirements Review meeting and spending an entire hour debating the meaning of a word. Don't remember the word, but it was something like "includes". 2) I separately remember being in a Requirements review for a feature that concluded successfully. Then later in a Design Review for that feature. And after that, Code and Unit Test reviews of the same feature. Then, months later, the feature was presented to the person who asked for it in the first place and then said, "that's not what I wanted. I wanted xxx instead." Yes, this person was at the Requirements and Design reviews!

LiquidSky 2y ago

New York attorney here. You're kind of getting it, though put in a silly way. It's not that "vague, bad stuff will happen" it's that, in common law jurisdictions at least, precedent controls. So if you use language that has been upheld for decades or even centuries you can be as confident as possible that whatever you're doing will also be upheld. Any novelty or variation introduces greater risk of a ruling against you. This naturally creates inertia and a conservative approach in legal practice.

mlinhares 2y ago
Nah, it's all a gentlemen's agreement, given Roe vs Wade, if you want it enough you can bend it the way you want.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  On which end of Roe? The reasoning for the decision was sketchy, and Dobbs overthrew decades of case law.
  - wbl 2y ago
    All of the original case, and Kennedy's sweet mystery opinion in Casey, and then the transparently political overturning emphasize how political courts can be. I read some of the argument transcripts and usually it is a bunch of lawyers trying to sort out what the law should be given it works this way in this case and that way in that case and this one goes up the middle or the circuits disagree. But sometimes it is much more nakedly political.
    - mlinhares 2y ago
      Yeah, people often think there's some magical value to words, but they only have value in the political environment they sit in. If you decide not to enforce it, it doesn't exist, if you decide to over enforce it, everyone will think about it. It's all people's decisions, there's no magic about it.
2y ago

coldtea 2y ago

>Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia Careful past that Chesterton fence

dotancohen 2y ago

> What matters is all the relevant case law Not in all jurisdictions. And even in those places, the laws are often difficult to decipher. I think that the problem is trying to encode both intent and formal instructions in the same language. If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent. This would be especially helpful in e.g. criminal law, where ambiguities or oversights in language (e.g. with regard to women raping men) often lead to both innocent people sitting in jail, and guilty people going free.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent This is how American laws are usually written. Courts even venture into the debate records to discern intent.
- dmoy 2y ago
  The intent bit in the laws is also is very brittle to changes in language. When the underlying words morph and mean different things, then hundreds of years later people kinda forget, and now we have a law that people think has a different intent. Similar to the way it's brittle when there are money numbers that don't include inflation (either on purpose or not), or (rarely) use a hilariously wrong inflation number instead of an index (say for a law passed during a time of very high inflation). Then the numbers change (or don't), and everything gets weird.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    This is why laws should sunset after some period of time, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. At that time they should be reviewed, debated again, and decisions made as to whether each law should be renewed as-is, revised, or (the default) allowed to lapse.

alexisread 2y ago

I think this is the crux of the problem, case law exists to help 'refine' and 'classify' a case ie. a crutch for an incomplete specification (the actual law). The 'workflow' is that the judgement on the current case informs the next ones and so on. I'd prefer it if previous cases had a bearing on rewriting/amending laws, rather than influencing a current case, and if the feeling is that a current judgement was not correct, rewrite/refine the law taking the case into account. That way a judgement does not require previous case research, this does mean that law needs to become a more well specified, and unambiguous language. We have decades of classification and computer language theory to draw from, and LLMs to stub-translate existing law, with exceptions going to a dead-letter-queue for individual appraisal. Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does someone know if they have broken it?

hansvm 2y ago
> Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does someone know if they have broken it? This is especially important in a world where precious few scenarios allow ignorance as a legal defense.
kristianbrigman 2y ago
I'd prefer to keep the separation of powers intact (legislature writes/modifies laws, judiciary can strike them down but can't (or isn't supposed to) make up law... the exchange is not that different between development and QA :) your process seems reasonable though.
bonoboTP 2y ago
That's called civil law and is used in almost all of Europe. Common law seems quite strange, nebulous and inefficient seen from a civil law continent.
wbl 2y ago
Congress can do this but chooses not to.
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escapecharacter 2y ago

I find there’s a similar hidden alternate semantic reality for business reviews. “Rustic” means the building is falling apart. “Bustling” means it’s impossible to find a seat. “Wholesome” means there’s no professional standards or consistency. It’s always an y in under-emphasis. It’s like two generations of reviewers ago, there were a bunch of defamation lawsuits and every reviewer has mimicked this style since.

taneq 2y ago

Much like systems code, right? :D (Mostly what I’m saying is that legalese is essentially natural(ish) language ‘software’ that has been developed and maintained over centuries by non-coders[1] and that most of the seemingly pointless or obtuse stuff is probably actually significant in weird edge cases.) [1] Not by any means saying that systems code is written by non-coders! But some of it is written by wizards and becomes Deep Magic that gets repeated by less eldrich contributors because if it isn’t then the authors sometimes meet a fiery doom.

kristianbrigman 2y ago
It's not _written_ by non-coders, but it is _used_ by non-coders who do not always follow the way you expect them to use it...

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> 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 both lawyers and laymen. Every lawyer and politician who claims that it is not worth optimizing this also claims that they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law. Tell this to every politican that if they don't work brutally hard on changing this fact they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law, and that they are thus (in the view of the ordinary citizen) working on to establish a arbitrary justice. Thus, they work on destroying (in the view of the ordinary constitutional state) on actively destroying the constitutional state. So, what makes these politicians and lawyers than differ from a despicable high traitor?

QuercusMax 2y ago
Half the politicians are lawyers, so it makes sense they'd want to protect their own interests.

mihaaly 2y ago

But the target audience is for laymen and not lawyers because we all have to abide the law and contracts and have to sign incomprehensive text that will have punishable consequence on us! How to obey the law/regulations/rules when you do not understand? My lawer should sign all my incomprehensible contracts and be punished for violations then, if the text is for them.

llamaimperative 2y ago
The target audience isn’t laypeople. That’s why you have a right to legal representation. “Laypeople” language is way, way too ambiguous. Same reason you can’t write computer code in lay language. … there are consequences for lawyers if they fail to do this translation effectively…
- johnisgood 2y ago
  If people really cared, law would have been written in Lojban. :P
- mihaaly 2y ago
  I am sorry but law is for every citizen who has to obey it, so it is for everyone and everyone have to understand not only lawyers, are you sure you know what you are saying? There can be no lawyer at every time you do almost anything in life, be in traffic, raise children, participate in education, purchase something, travel, anything! Do you need an engineer sitting right next to you when you turn on the light or operate a vechicle? No! You need them for advanced things. If you argue that ALL law have to be understood only by lawyers then you are very very lost! What you have to obey, you have to understand! At least the relevant part (nuclear waste storage is perhaps not for you, I am just guessing), but even knowing which part is relevant you need to understand! Not enough lawyers to sit next to everyone guiding through everyday life that is regulated by law! It is difficult to understand because it made to sound ominous (fucked up for everyone), that's it, see the article. Form over essence. Also evolving without effort for restructuring so it becomes overcomplicated (see article). All formality over practicality and common sense, that's why it is so convoluted, or "it’s an accidental property", mimicing for centuries. Also don't mix up everyday language here used with friends over a beer that could be vague for outsiders - or themselves - but there ARE ways to be specific and understood with ordinary people too using the generic communication method law uses too: language. That could been used, that is being used in other areas in communicating towards layman (like doctors, I mean the smart ones, not engulfing you with latin explaining your condition and prognosis, right? Also instruction manuals for complex gadgets are not in ancient greek just for the sake of it, right, but ordinary and specific or even formal language that are still being understood by the ordinary consumer, as that is important.) Additionally: "Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.". I rest my case.

zo1 2y ago

My pet half-serious quip about laws/lawyers. Imagine writing a complex program without loops and functions, but you have access to C++ templates, and if statements can only be written as in-line switch statements that can't have any function calls. Oh and any "changes" to the code have to be done in the form of diff files that are included in the next program that may or may not be related. That's how laws are written.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

Another form of hilarious incantation in legalese are the way "patches" do work. There's a complete vocabulary and way to formulate sentences to, literally, apply patches to older texts. It's "diff" but for legal text, using natural language (well as much as legalese is natural). I don't know in english but in french you can definitely have a legal text (say for your company statuses) and then patches when you did modify things. Or you can have the "consolidated" text, which is the text with the patches already applied (it's definitely more of an easier read as there's no need to jump back and forth between the patches). And of course the patches can reference another legalese text, which itself can reference another legalese text. And all of these can have... Patches. These patches/revisions going out of their way to introduce a patching logic using natural language is plain weird. Besides these patches/revisions, I'd say the second most WTF legalese thing is that somehow, at some point, where there were already rules and laws governing what a person could and could not do, someone, somewhere (in Rome probably), decided that we could create new persons, but not physical persons: entities dealt with as if they were individuals. But virtual. I did set up a company: I created a person. And we do shareholders meetings and vote stuff and go in front of a notary and that notary comes up with revisions and we patch the person I created by sending the patches to the authorities. It's completely mindboggling.

freejazz 2y ago
You think its mindboggling that some laws refer to other laws? Really??

tetha 2y ago

Good laws should also "scale out" into unknown complexity and situations. For example, every german has a right to control pictures of their own self, and the way the law was worded, it already applied an idea on the legality of sharing/distributing deepfakes of regular citizens. However, this kind of generalization requires very careful wording. Every single word and every single statement will be examined for inclusion and exclusion of situations across many court cases. This means it's hard to formulate these laws. And then you rely on age-old, court- and battle-proven formulations... even if they are clunky and not intuitive.

Nasrudith 2y ago
The scalability when further out sounds fundamentally like a coin-flip with future technologies, for if it makes sense or not. Three dimensional cameras of regular citizens being covered would be a hit. But what about misses, like say if artificial eyes became a norm would looking at someone technically be a violation under the law because you are technically recording them without permission even if it is just to a small operating buffer before it is passed to the optic nerve?
- tetha 2y ago
  If we stay in this example - and I am neither Judge nor Lawyer, so I'm just a layperson: To be specific, every citizen has the right to control the distribution of their own image. Merely taking a picture is not illegal, except for certain areas of "highest privacy", like a bathroom in your home. It only becomes problematic if the picture is distributed. For example, this is why many concerts include waivers that you agree for your picture to be distributed in the context of this concert. Thus, an artificial eye recording -- and even recording to an SD card -- would be no problem. And that is how a good law should be written: It should be written with the rights, duties and protection of citizens involved so it allows the judges to make new technology fit into the framework of the rights of the people. And sure, it may fail at times. But that is what appeals and adjustments are for.

freejazz 2y ago

This is just dunning kruger effect

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webspinner 2y ago

Well, here's how you come to understand it. You take the time to read filings, and follow trials. Trust me, it works!

justanotherjoe 2y ago

>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. Well to add to that, representing yourself is a really bad optics and you can't fervently defend yourselves. That's why even lawyers when put on trial will use other lawyers.

ted_bunny 2y ago

I worked in discovery. A lot of subpoenas still request microfiche and other formats that likely haven't been used in decades. Because there's that one clinic who still uses them who thinks "any and all records" must imply "except if you think of some convoluted exception"