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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

It seems terrible for everyone. Poor people get stuck with false accusations by the police, no bail, and public defenders who are either incompetent or overworked.

Rich people (or middle class founders who dream of getting rich) get to deal with incomprehensible tax and accounting laws where no one can ever really be sure that they're compliant. Ben Horowitz had the luck to receive good legal advice and the wisdom to listen to it. No doubt some others who had the latter, still went to jail for lacking the former.

How does one even reform something like this? Some kind of legibility requirement applied to all written law? Has such a proposal ever gained traction?

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A good start would be to write the law in a way an average Joe could understand it. I can already hear the legal sector screaming ' it's impossible!!'. A good example is the 'plain English' requirement for some documents issued by the financial institutions to retail customers in the UK. I saw first hand what that means when we did projects for banks: bank's analyst sends a report to a professional investor- the text is almost illegible and full of jargon. Asset management issues a piece to retail customer and it's all easy to read and understand, because it was written with such notion in mind.

I have seen some companies do this in the US but they always caveat the simple language version as being inferior to the legalese, and if you were to end up in proceedings against them it would be the latter document with the legal weight.

There are lots of legal terms that are very specific in their meaning and use and no alternatives can be used in legal proceedings,so they really have no choice in most situations. Unless the legal language and they way it's structured would change, nothing will change.

When it’s considered normal for Congress to vote for laws that they haven’t read because the laws are so verbose that it wouldn’t be practical I don’t hold out much hope for the sanity you are suggesting.

This is so packed with implicit assumptions that I don't even know where to begin. How about this: tax and accounting laws are not incomprehensible.

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