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> Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet? Properly drafted English-language laws do read as code. It's like how you can describe formal logic in English: "
by jarrett 13y ago
> Law is code. Why haven't we fixed this yet?
Properly drafted English-language laws do read as code. It's like how you can describe formal logic in English: "All Americans wear hats. I am an American. Therefore I wear a hat."
I take it you're arguing for something like Lojban, though. I see two problems there. First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land. Second, and probably more incurably, these types of languages don't remove the most important kinds of ambiguity in laws.
Most disputes over ambiguity in legal text do not arise from syntactic ambiguity. It's not usually confusion over what words the "not" modifies, or which "if" is nested within which. Rather, most problems arise from semantic ambiguity, i.e. the meaning of the individual words. What constitutes a "bank," exactly? What does it mean to do something "in a reasonable period of time?" If you're "bearing" arms, where exactly are you bearing them?
You might argue that the problem then comes down to defining your terms well. That's certainly a noble goal when drafting legal text. But one of the principle goals of legal drafting is to make the text flexible enough to apply to specific circumstances that the authors could not have foreseen. This, of course, is in constant tension with the need to be precise. The more precise you are, the easier it is to interpret the law, but the more likely it is that someone will find a loophole arising from the excessive narrowness of your language.
A language like Lojban won't alleviate these difficulties, unfortunately.
- echohack 13y ago> First, it's not the (de facto) national language, which infringes on one's fundamental right to read the laws of the land... Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand, and makes the same problem. I think it's more accessible to run something through a compiler...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 13y agoIt might take years to become a lawyer, but I bet their are more than a few people here who have spotted an error (international or accidental) in a contract that has passed under the eyes if a lawyer or two. My wife and have caught several major errors in our time that could have cost us a lot of money. There is no substitute for a careful reading of a contract, legal training optional.
- IvyMike 13y ago> Legaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand This is why I'm against EULAs. As a non-lawyer, it's an asymmetrical game--I have no idea what the legaleese I'm agreeing to actually means in a court.
- anigbrowl 13y agoLegaleese requires you to take years of law classes to even understand No it doesn't.
- jarrett 13y agoI've never taken a law class, but I've read and understood many, many statutes and contracts. I'm sure you could too. Does that mean all legal drafting is clear? No. But much of it is sufficiently clear for a literate person to understand. By way of example, I've chosen a passage from the Illinois criminal code, more or less at random: "Theft of property not from the person and not exceeding $500 in value is a Class 4 felony if the theft was committed in a school or place of worship or if the theft was of governmental property." This is a typical example of legalese. It bakes several conditions into one sentence: 1) not from the person, 2) value under $500, 3) in a school, 4) in a place of worship, 5) on government property. Most legal writing I've encountered is at roughly this level of complexity. Certainly, there's a lot of logic packed into that one sentence. There's much more to parse out than there is in a typical newspaper sentence. But I'm willing to bet most people can read that law and understand what it means. (Not that you'd necessarily know what a Class 4 felony is. But you'd know some of the circumstances under which a theft qualifies as one.)
- btilly 13y agoThe problem is that legalese is specially designed to make meaning today out of decisions made a century ago based on laws written over 2 centuries ago which inherit from a common law framework that came to this continent about 3 centuries ago and dates back to precedents that predate the modern English language. If we were to make everything be written in normal English, the same problem would eventually re-emerge.
- warfangle 13y agoA language like Prolog might, though. Through necessity of defining terms.