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Comment by dogweather | Hacker News Reader

Lol, thanks for the perspective from the across the water. I'm already surprised to learn how similar the concepts are (still) across all the common law countries. Even, say, between the U.S. and New Zealand. I was also surprised to find out how easy Canada's sites are to parse, which is why there are so many Canadian sources in the dataset. They're on top of their game with compliant and uniform web apps.

And yep, I found that page too, and it's on my list of Australian sources to add. This one's good, although not as readable:

https://fedcourt.gov.au/digital-law-library/glossary-of-lega...

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> I'm already surprised to learn how similar the concepts are (still) across all the common law countries.

We can blame the Roman's and, in no small part, William Garrow for all that ..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Garrow

Despite concepts in common there can still remain the complaint of Shaw (and later Wilde) that we are divided by a common language.

Readability is good, at some point in any legal procedure though there comes an importance of being precise about nomenclature.

In the field of mathematics, for example, such phrases as "if and only if" and "neccesary and sufficient" go deeper than casual reading might understand.

Now comes the twist in law that common phrases may have different interpretations between countries, or as may the case in the USofA, between different counties or states.

Still any move to increase understanding of the law in general with pointers to the law in specific locations is a good one.

Thanks! Interesting info. For sure, I agree that vocabulary is important, and specialized words are extremely valuable. On the other hand, I'm intrigued by professionally written dictionaries that use a simplified English of a few thousand words in the definitions. Then, of course, sentence length and structure also come into play.

BTW, the Dale-Chall formula uses two factors to score readability: (1) Average sentence length (longer is worse), and (2) percent of "difficult" words. They've done scientific validation of this small and easy set of metrics. (See The New Dale-Chall Formula.) To determine whether a word is "difficult", they created a list of 3,000 "easy" words that 80% of 4th graders know. (It was developed to help design textbooks for children.) It's an interesting algorithm which is an easy-to-implement proxy for deeper linguistic analysis.

I've found that this very simple algorithm does a decent job of putting the easiest-to-grok definitions at the top. Meanwhile, sentences with parentheticals, lots of prepositions and passive voice are rated less readable and pushed towards the bottom of the page.

Conversationally, in a beer over a barbie kind of way, no offence intended,

Dale-Chell lost me at "words that 80% of fourth-graders in American schools knew in 1948 (revised 1984)".

A cookie in 1984 is not the cookie of the 2020s web savvy teenager.

This particular article from the UK shares many of my own feelings about automated readability indexes:

https://www.effortmark.co.uk/readability-formulas-seven-reas...

I still admire your goal here, I'm simply suggesting to rely on a modicum of actual human feedback over automation where possible.

> beer over a barbie

I immediately pictured rude things being done to a Barbie Doll. Which is probably your point.

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