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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

The problem is we are obligated by law... to know and understand the law.

So the issue is more than the law texts and contracts are too complicated for us to understand despite the fact we are living by them.

You can't have a lawyer behind each decision of your life. But if you want to live a legal life, right now you need to. It's insane and not be sustainable for a democracy.

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They're not complicated! There's been a tremendous movement over the last 50 years to write the law in plain English and to banish legalese.

If they are not complicated, then there are no appeals right?

And no law journals, no need of knowledge of precedents. In fact, why even have lawyers?

I might agree that I could read the words in laws and think I understand them, but I disagree that 'the law' is that simple.

We have Javascript developers, and blog posts, and knowledge of APIs, but nobody would call Javascript complicated.

I've seen a lot of confusion about "this" in javascript, to the point of multiple articles making it to the front page of hacker news on the topic.

Law is like javascript, except every other word needs the same context and explanation that "this" requires.

Not only that, but disagreements about what something means is often a Very Hard Problem, and even when courts judge something one way or another, there are many people who _disagree strongly_, and hope to either change the judiciary, or change the laws to more explicitly favor their position. (This is, as far as I recall, how one is supposed to resolve disagreements about what the law _should be_ in our country.)

For example, many reasonable people disagree on whether the second amendment's wording is intended to mean that _everyone_ should be able to bear arms, or whether it's intended to mean _only people in a militia_, and there also seems to be some disagreement on what "arms" means. I can see how a reasonable person could interpret it in either way. Such disagreement seems to have been something which the founders themselves shared.

tl;dr: People disagree both on what we currently interpret words in law to mean, as well as on what the _intent_ was when it was originally written.

I've heard of much more successful people trying to teach themself JS and build something that trying to learn laws and defend themself in court.

And yet, yes, I'll argue that dev, in any language, is complicated.

Hell, there is a good part of the population that will consider assembling an ikea desk complicated. Let's not forget we are in the HN bubble here.

Appeals are rarely about what the law means. Most appeals are about whether the law was properly followed in the specific case at hand.

People are fallible. Just because something is simple and known doesn't mean that there won't be mistakes.

I hear people saying that about Monads sometimes.

Statisticly people representing themself in court have very little chance to win a case.

The sheer amount of data you need to assimilate to just have an idea of what you need to do makes dealing with law a complex matter. Add this complexity to jargon, social and political dynamics and of course, experience, and you have a very complicated problem.

The law is not just an isolated set of words of paper. It's an intricate piece of a several systems.

But you don't need to go this far to prove my point. Take any recent bill, and make your grandma read it, then write a summary of it. She votes, but can she understand it ?

Dude.

Case law, is the only thing that matters.

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