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> Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation

The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter, Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch agencies to use plain language in any official document they produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contracts exist, though I'm less aware of that.

See: https://centerforplainlanguage.org/2021-federal-plain-langua...

And: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/

The US really does lag behind on this one; the push for plain English was phenomenally more successful in other Anglophone common law jurisdictions.

Having practised as a lawyer in one of them, I can confirm much contemporary American legal writing seems absurd and even comical. There’s something amateurish about it; like a layman trying to ad-lib some law talk at a party by cobbling together some obscure law terms he’s overheard.

“The first party of the aforementioned party - THIS PART IS IN CAPS - will henceforth wheretofore undertake that by no later than St Swithen’s Day - MORE CAPS MEANS MORE LAW - ”

I feel like this happens in Canada too because federal (and lots but not all provincial (“state”)) law/websites/guides has to be bilingual and they’ll have equal force. If the translations don’t mean exactly the same thing, hilarity ensues!

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25...

Tangent: Montreal francinization laws are such a pain in the ass.

On the other hand, if it’s been championed since Nixon, that means his problem is not solved.

Yeah, I doubt it ever will be.

Reading some of these before/afters gives me hope, though: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/

Before:

> This form will be used by Federal agencies to obtain applicant certification that States which have established a review and comment procedure in response to Executive Order 12372 and have selected the program to be included in their process, have been given an opportunity to review the applicant’s submission.

After

> If your State requires an opportunity to review your application, use this form to certify that you have done so. Include the form in your application.

What does "requiring an opportunity to review" mean? :o

Does the process include a review by the state or not? If yes it's mandatory, right? Not an "opportunity", and it's not just a "movie review" review, right? So it means state needs to approve it, no?

So shouldn't this be phrased as "include government permit here (whether it's applicable for you, see how your state reacted to Executive Order 12372)"?

Nixon was the last “liberal” president. Not really surprising no meaningful reform has been pushed through since him

Yet the references you give are super recent. I guess that highlights my point somewhat?

This has been an issue since before Clinton (ie before my commercial experience) at the least.

> I would very much argue against those (even in this thread), that say that the lay-person isn't the intended audience for lots of contracts, particularly for T&Cs where they are often written by a contracts lawyer, for a contracts lawyer or judge, but should ABSOLUTELY be written for the lay-person to understand.

I would argue that if a lay-person is expected to comply with the law/contract, then lay-person should be the intended audience.

Yeah. England&Wales legislation is fairly comprehensible. Of course it could be better. I just ran a random tax law through Hemingway and it scores between Grade 9 and 11, occasionally hitting Grade 13. So that's sort of fine, I think?

Apart from the bonkers preamble which decorates every act, of course!

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2022/40/introduction (Postgraduate, poor)

Having exposure to other anglosphere (neat) lawyers, this is 100% on purpose and thought of as job security. Law school is an expensive wizard school where you learn how to speak the right incantations.

American patents are written in a language that isn't English. It's very precise if you can learn to read it, though. The same seems to hold for contracts, but to a lesser degree.

I'm a patent examiner and I can't agree with "It's very precise if you can learn to read it". A large fraction of patent applications I've worked on are unclear. I even wrote a linter to help catch some problems.

(DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)

Edit: I will agree that patent claims can be precise, but so can normal English. I think patent claims are too often not precise.

I'm curious what you think about a post I did ten years ago, on "defying" the Single Sentence Rule when drafting patent claims: https://www.oncontracts.com/multi-sentence-claims/

Your proposed claim format would greatly improve clarity.

I particularly like the definitions and examples being included in the claims. Too often patent attorneys define terms contrary to their ordinary meaning. I might not think to check the specification for a definition, and end up wasting a lot of time.

With that being said, I sometimes do 112(b) rejections for exemplary language in claims as they can make the claims unclear (for example: "for example"). I think if the claim or specification was written to make it clear that the examples are just examples and not limiting the claim then it would be okay.

Reference numbers are common in patent claims outside of the US, but it seems that US patent attorneys worry that adding reference numbers would limit the breadth of the claims. There's no statute or USPTO rule against reference numbers in the claims and I'm not aware of any case law justifying not adding them. Not having reference numbers in the claims is a loss for clarity, particularly when the claims use different terminology than the specification (which is unfortunately common).

(Again, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)

Wow, this is fascinating. Do you know how many examiners are using this tool? Why did you choose to make the default configuration more nitpicky than yourself, and is this the config you use when running the tool?

I'm not aware of any other examiners who use this tool. I did ask an examiner I know to try it and they did, but they didn't find it useful. They suggested that the warnings that plint returns are more relevant to the areas I examine than what they examine, which is fair. They also found my syntax for antecedent basis checking to be confusing.

The personal reason why I made it nitpicky is that there's a huge variability between examiners in terms of which rejections to make. I'm a junior examiner, so everything I do has to be approved by someone else. They might tell me to remove a certain rejection because they don't have a problem with that, and to add some other rejections for things they care about. In my view, it would be better to get a wide range of possible rejections upfront and then think about which ones the person signing off on the office action cares about. The alternative is going back and forth about which rejections to do, which would take more time.

The JSON configuration file I use filters out a bunch of the rules because the person who signs my office actions right now doesn't care about those ones, or I don't care about those ones. I need to update the README file to say that.

Also, an attorney writing a patent application has much less information about which rejections are likely than I do. So from the perspective of an attorney, I think being nitpicky makes sense too. Not that I'm aware of any attorneys who use plint.

plint might not even be nitpicky enough. Recently r/patentexaminer had a poll [0] where about 6% of examiners said that the term "at least one" was indefinite... which is astounding to me as I think that's totally fine from a definiteness standpoint. As I recall, I have some warnings in my linter for enablement on that in case it's not clear how having two or more of something would work if only one is disclosed. But usually "at least one" is fine from an enablement perspective.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/xfvsrs/at_l...

(Again, my posts here are only my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)

How do you become a patent examiner? Could anyone do it for their area of expertise or is it more like being a specialized researcher specifically for patent applications?

Apply on USAJOBS: https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?k=patent+examiner

Looks like the USPTO is hiring in multiple areas right now.

It might take a couple attempts to get hired. I was rejected the first time I applied.

The USPTO doesn't care much about an applicant's background aside from whether the applicant has a technical degree. New examiners with expertise in particular areas probably won't be assigned to their areas of expertise, even if there's a strong demand for examiners in those areas. Yes, this makes no sense, but it's how the USPTO operates at the moment. I had zero experience with the areas I was assigned before I became an examiner.

(Again, this is all just my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)

Usually when people say this, they mean the claims. The specification, which most engineers read, are not constrained by legal precedent.

I tend to disagree. US law does require "plain language" in certain places (privacy policies for example) and that doesn't help. Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their legal requirements are harder to decipher.

Yeah, the EU one can be quite an issue.

Often the EU "principle" that is then enshrined in individual country's laws is fairly straight forward. However, you really need to understand the individual country and their regulator to understand their take on it and enforcement. There can be a huge disparity between countries, despite all being rooted in the same principle.

> Also, while EU law is, perhaps, written in clearer language, the ambiguity of how it will be interpreted and enforced is actually so much less clear that overall their legal requirements are harder to decipher.

This may be true, but the ambiguity of legal requirements is a separate issue entirely (i.e. the reason the requirements are amgibuous isn't because the language is simple, it's because the legal systems are very different, and sometimes the ambiguity is a feature rather than a flaw as it can help provide member countries a level of flexibility if maintaining the spirit of the law).