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Comment by clejack | Hacker News Reader

The most amazing thing about this to me is that as conceptually interesting as this contract is at a high level, and given that I started off interested in the document, about half way through my eyes were glazing over ;and I gave up.

I have to wonder how lawyers do their job. I've read chapters of academic text for my own knowledge, but somehow this legal writing style crushes me every time.

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Think of legal writing as an incredibly wordy programming language and it will make a lot more sense. Lawyers aren't reading this for fun, their brains are decoding how the computer (i.e. judges) will interpret it.

Makes me think of smart contracts.

Lawyer here.

Legalisms don't make for particularly hard contracts.

In the real world, I've found complexity is often caused by attempts to simplify the contract. Or perhaps to simplify its drafting.

The most common offender is the overuse of Definitions which are often Capitalised Definitions. Interestingly in code you might compare it to the use of a function (); except that in the real world you can't easily call a function - you physically have to flick back and forth between pages to understand what the contract means.

The other cause of complexity is when parts of the contract aren't written by lawyers, but by engineers or risk analysts. Which the lawyers will do to simplify their job. I've seen some of these contracts and after weeks I can't understand them. A judge interpreting this contract basically has to become an expert in the relevant subject area. I don't envy them.

How common is it that a judge has to dig deeply into a contract?

Depends on the nature of the issue at trial.

Sometimes it's fairly confined. Usually they don't need to understand the whole thing.

But the interpretation isn't piecemeal and usually requires understanding the background.

> you physically have to flick back and forth between pages to understand what the contract means.

Well, when a function is called the computer does this as well. And it drags me along with it when I am in a debugging session with a debugger on :P

I recently received a sentence where the judge copy pasted someone else's and midway there are names of people unrelated to the proceedings.

Apparently this sort of errors is common enough that the law has already support for handling them as "irrelevant", but this proved to me people seldomly read law stuff accurately.

I recently bought a house in California and at some point a few hundred pages in I started to wonder about the wisdom of my insistence on reading everything. But it's straightforward enough to understand if you can tolerate the boredom.

A few hundred pages? Here in The Netherlands, the contract is maybe five pages, then a list of things that will stay in the house and finally a list of Q&A with the current owner about things like the wiring, any easements, etc. It's usually a model contract too, so you can compare your copy to the published model contract.

What's in these "few hundred pages"?

In California the seller discloses as much as possible to the buyer - i) house inspection and pest inspection, ii) disclosures from the county, state, utilities district, iii) advisories of risk of wildfire, lead paint, natural hazards, earthquake; and much more. This is so that the buyer has as little possible recourse to sue in the future for losses on the property. This behavior also enables faster real estate deals b/c the buyer is more willing to offer without contingencies.

I don't see how you figure. You get the disclosures long after you make your offer (although you do have a contingency if you don't like what you see, I think). And the mandatory disclosure system opens you up to more risk of lawsuit, since if you fail to disclose something you, in the view of the legal system, reasonably should have known, that's grounds for a suit (compared to MA, where I used to live, where you're free not to make a disclosure at all so you can't be said to have omitted anything). Also, dealing with the title company and all that definitely seemed slower than the system I previously experienced where both sides had lawyers to hash out small details.

If you are working with a real estate agent they can pull the disclosures before you make the offer. I am not sure how it works for no agent sales.

Also the disclosures have copious language to the effect of "To the best of sellers' knowledge" and "Buyer agrees to do their own research". I think this is supposed to indemnify the seller.

I was working with an agent and I barely was able to get those disclosures before closing because of the sluggishness of the seller's chosen title company. For the disclosures, you're clear if you didn't know about it, but the issue of whether you reasonably should have known about an issue remains. Just saying to the best of my knowledge doesn't clear you on that. And figuring out what you reasonably should have known can be a protracted legal argument.

Just as an example, imagine you buy a house from me that turns out to have foundation issues. Imagine I hadn't disclosed them, but I had actually filled in and painted over a number of cracks in the wall. That could possibly be construed as an effort to cover up the problem and deceive. But maybe I just thought I was making it look nice.

In short, mandatory disclosures protect the buyer, not the seller. The seller gains nothing.

Purchase terms, disclosures about the property, disclosures about the area it's in, financing terms, HOA bylaws, HOA financing, and lots more HOA stuff, title information, tax information... basically as much fun as you can have. And they keep adding more legally required disclosures, I think far past the point of diminishing returns as far as making anyone actually informed.

Denmark - several documents probably around 40-50 pages in my case.

What comprises the house - garden etc. size of different parts.

the house is shared with a neighbor, requirements for the sharing of house with neighbor.

what parts of the shared areas are yours (a walk in closet downstairs and some weird crawl space in a wall)

known problems with house that the seller has told me of.

all the things you named.

An evaluation of the house condition for insurance purposes.

on edit: formatting

My flats contract takes a full binder, the stack is easily 10cm. This is certainly an extreme case since it’s an old building in a compound with pretty complex history, but that happens.

On France it is completely covered by the law and you cannot make any arrangements. So the document is pages and pages long (this is France, we live bureaucracy) but the content is the same for everyone.

It wild be much easier to have a 3 pages agreement with references but how would the notary explain their costs?

Au least as a seller and buyer you are safe.

This was not written by lawyers. Law students... maybe, but not actual lawyers. It reads like someone who has seen property transfer contracts but hasn't actually used them in the real world to transfer intangibles.

>>Seller agrees to honor the spirit of this agreement

Big red flag there. I have never run across anyone with legal training using "spirit" language.

>>ignorance of any consequences ... will not invalidate the enforceability

More novel language not from any legal treatise. And, by way of further example, a lawyer would have dropped the useless "the" before enforceability.

> I have never run across anyone with legal training using "spirit" language.

I know what you mean (and agree), but some spirit language seems required by the subject matter :-)...

I'm not a lawyer, but I took a few courses on legal English at university. These courses predominantly approached the subject matter from a linguistic, rather than a professional point of view.

I find the language of common law, its richness, and history to be quite fascinating. The nuances and details it is able to convey are astounding.

Legal doublets such as "cease and desist" or "terms and conditions" are an example of this. These phrases originated when multiple languages (i.e., Norman French, Middle English, and Latin) were used simultaneously in English society.

Often consisting of two near synonyms, one from an Anglo-Saxon / Old English origin, one from a French or Latin one, these doublets helped with clarifying intent for readers with different native language backgrounds.

Practice and context. Read nonsense everyday, and you'll get good at it. Assign meaning to the nonsense, and it'll be more palatable.

How do we all just tap away at these buttons-with-letters all day?

I've always wanted to build an app announced "Button!" every time I clicked a button or key throughout the day. Might be good for context, or just the lolz.

I wonder how many of us who've coauthored a patent ever genuinely read through the final version we signed. I did manage to get all the words to pass through my conscious awareness.

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