MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style
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I also think lawyers don't find it worth optimising the language much, because the target audience is other lawyers who know all the incantations anyway. The target audience is lawyers instead of laypeople, because the language isn't what matters in the first place. What matters is all the relevant case law, which can vary so much from the "obvious" or even "right" interpretaion of the written language, that a layperson not using a lawyer for all but the most trivial legal needs is a recipe for disaster.
But on the other hand, you shouldn't need a law degree and bar license to sue an insurance company to pay up. Their client hit you, you're injured, now pay up or have a judge order you to. But the lawmen have carved out their own moat that puts ordinary people in a position to rely on them.
In that context, does it really seem so absurd that the rules are "obtuse"? Many people feel that way when reading someone else's code, but that doesn't mean all the weird conditionals are unnecessary.
Realistically, you’re probably not going to go to jail immediately but you can have a bad time if you’re caught doing some things you didn’t even know were illegal.
I’ve done software (a lot) and worked in a legislative office (a little), they are extremely different.
> Laws are programs.
Laws are not programs, or even meaningfully analogous to anything so deterministic. They are more like, if we must make a computing analogy, components of prompt templates (other portions of which will be filled by evidence and…well, a bunch of other stuff you don’t control when writing the laws) that will be used by an extremely high temperature LLM. Which you can’t actually test freely against, though you can observe past behavior – but, even then, you are stymied by the fact that the LLM itself is constantly updated with retrained, and sometimes rearchitected, versions, without useful release notes.
It's just that the programming language is mushy-- 400 definitions of the word "set" is the example my AI offers-- and the interpreters vary. In a pinch, the code writers know that nearly anything they write can be rescued by the chief interpreter, which has led to a model of legislatures intentionally writing ambiguous code and top-level courts interpreting with an emphasis on public good.
But, when you go down some arcane rabbit hole that will normally be interpreted by functionaries -- bankruptcy comes to mind-- suddenly everything is prescribed with remarkable precision and it becomes obvious again, law is code.
If this were really true, there would be zero appellate cases (and probably not even trial cases, as the clear and only correct resolution would be apparent to all parties without a trial which would only add expense) in these areas, and yet... That's very much not the case.
If law, even in these areas, is “code”, it is so more in the sense of the Pirates Code in Pirates of the Carribean, not computer software.
If you look at code as in, only syntax and its meaning for the language, I can see how folks might reason along the lines of 'law is similar enough to code. You are saying what can and can't be done'
However, code is rarely only its syntax. Its meaning is contextual, often to the business of which it applies, and would have no real meaning outside of that context, and context may change at any given time, which means reinterpreting the code, replacing the code etc.
That is what law in practice, is what code is in practice. Its syntax is very technical, but its meaning is entirely dependent upon its applied context.
I been thinking alot about this lately, and understanding the sociological implications of code in an organization (or in more extreme cases, society) has really changed my point of view of how to build software
If I were to translate this into code, it would mean that variables that were constant will sometimes still change value. It would mean that operations on data would differ depending on the scope in which the operations were applied. And it would mean that certain variables that were closer to the base address (more money) would operate differently than variables stored in distant memory offsets [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaxico_Burress#:~:text=On%2...)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_sentencing_of_Robe...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/part-II/chapter-3...
Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs.
I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!
Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train.
Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
Computing became cheaper because it has layer upon layer of economies of scale.
Law doesn’t because every case is unique and is literally decided upon minutiae and exceptional details.
Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.
And smart software engineers never over-complicate their code, right?
“Wild” is the most generous word I could come up with, sorry!
Is software engineering arcane for similar gatekeepy reasons or is that for more legitimate reasons?
My personal suspicion is that software is one of the easiest fields in the world to learn, and it has the sneaky benefit that you don't have to brush up against many constraints of the real world, but then — this doesn't explain the apparent god complex many programmers have.
And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply complicated and we need to use complicated tools, specifications, processes and other such things in order to describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next.
This is why they are so against automation and simplification of their field. They know that if they automate the processes, that their field becomes very focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just realize that most of what they know can be codified in some sort of unambiguous specification format.
A machine cannot be held accountable, and therefore should not be in charge of making decisions.
In theory, yes. In practice, not “everyone”, and very much not equally true of everyone to whom the law practically applies at all, even in the places which tout “equal protection of the laws” as a bedrock principle.
You can learn a lot by watching or asking others.
Your fear seems unfounded.
In medicine if you get things very wrong, you die, your patient dies, or everyone in the room dies.
In programming if you get things wrong, you give someone radiation poisoning and they die, a plane crashes, or someone loses days of work.
Surely, those are bigger injustices.
If the American legal system is any indication, the vague, bad stuff is the desired outcome.
It's amazing the regulations that the EU has where it says "no, do not do this", and not only do people generally not do it, the people who do get caught doing it are fined into oblivion for it. There's no culture of hiring teams of lawyers to poke holes in the law to get around something society clearly desired, because the court is going to do what society desired.
Why, yes, I am talking about data privacy, but there are other examples.
Wat. I’ve literally seen tax laws in Germany and Sweden which could only possibly apply to one family. European law is in sans serif; that doesn’t mean it’s less convoluted than American law.
You’re seriously arguing that the EU bureaucracy is streamlined and comprehensible without lawyers? Why do you think every rich person and powerful firm in Europe has fleets of lawyers?
Are we watching the same Supreme Court?
That, to me, sounds a lot like a judiciary that wants to have things decided via the interpretation of legalese by a lawyer instead of by facts as determined by the present will of the people.
IETF defines may, must, shall, etc. in every document but doesn't use the same format as law.
1) I remember being in a Requirements Review meeting and spending an entire hour debating the meaning of a word. Don't remember the word, but it was something like "includes".
2) I separately remember being in a Requirements review for a feature that concluded successfully. Then later in a Design Review for that feature. And after that, Code and Unit Test reviews of the same feature. Then, months later, the feature was presented to the person who asked for it in the first place and then said, "that's not what I wanted. I wanted xxx instead."
Yes, this person was at the Requirements and Design reviews!
To do it, lawyers would have to learn some category theory, but I think many of them would enjoy it.
Many probably discovered it already, without realizing it has a name.
When I was I law school they taught us to write as clearly as possible and avoid legalese. Hopefully that catches on, I don't think legalese is good or necessary. Clarity is better
There’s a famous story of Warren Buffet buying Nebraska Furnitur Mart with no paperwork whatsoever, just some verbal assurances, a handshake, and a TV interview with the esteemed owner.
Everybody learns partially through pattern recognition, partially from trial and error, partially from armchair reasoning. And functions mostly by repeating what they already know.
But it's emotionally satisfying to put all the negative parts onto others (cargo cult sheeple reciting magic spells), and save all the positive identifiers for yourself (brave scientist uncovering truths about the universe)
They certainly did.
coliveira is saying a change in legal language opens up a contract to a reasonably different interpretation in the future. And we know it's reasonable (even likely) because there are myriad historical precedents where such ambiguities were used in the past to win cases against, say, GrantMoyer's Optimized Non-Standard Legal Language Law Offices. By using standard language that specific class of ambiguity issues goes away.
On the other hand, any good faith definition of "superstitious" is a pejorative that holds the belief to be irrational. So when GrantMoyer's Optimized Non-Standard Legal Language Law Offices uses its patent-pending optimized, non-standard language in their contracts, they are throwing out all the superstitious terminology on the basis that nothing bad will actually happen as a result of doing this. (At least, aside from things like random chance or any of the other true reasons that just happen coincide with superstitious falsehoods.) That's a bad idea-- it isn't supported by historical precedent, and it is likelihood to cause predictably bad outcomes in the future.
The only mitigating factor is this weasel sentence:
"Except sometimes the superstitions are right."
But to be generous we must take that to mean only the truism that superstition sometimes coincides with things like random chance. (Otherwise it'd be like saying no one goes to a particular restaurant anymore because it's so crowded, which is funny but incoherent.)
Edit: clarifications. Also, in closing, Your Honor, I call for one of those "bad court thingies." :)
Sure, some "superstitions" are the result of random folklore, and can be ignored without consequence. (Knock on wood!) But others are the result of meme-ized facts, passed on via something that's folklorish and easy to remember to share.
Thus, it is fair to use the word "superstition" to describe something you think might be harmless, but may actually have serious consequences, if ignored, after all.
It's irrational to think the awkward phrasing is actually better, but when you're being judged by other people sometimes they're going to enforce the bias.
Hackers (in the HN sense) also excel with programming language nuances.
Here's an example. Patent lawyers absolutely love the word "plurality", a very uncommon word in normal English. They mean "more than one", but why don't they say that? It's not only clearer but it's also less ambiguous (check the many definitions of "plurality").
It's because they are copying a rule without thinking about it. Other examples of that:
* "an historical occasion" - this is wrong, it's "a historical occasion", but people hear it and think it's some special rule
* Not using "I" in research papers, even with a single author! There's no rule that requires this but people think there is. I read a paper once that used "I". It was great.
But, in any case, for those who pronounce the h, “a historical” is easier to say.
In the case of lawyers I’d suspect tradition first and fear of typos reversing meaning (“ahistorical”) second.
You're only doing it because you've heard other people do it and you think there's some special rule for it. Maybe subconsciously even.
And don't say "you can't say something is wrong in language because prescriptivism Vs descriptivism etc."
Yes generally it is the case that language is defined by how it is used. This is an exception, where something has a very very clear purpose and usage, and you're doing it wrong.
I actually can't think of any clearer cases where the prescriptivists are right. It would have to be something so obvious you don't even think about it, like using spaces between words. Yet for some reason everyone messes up "a historical". It's as bizarre as if everyone omitted spaces before "historical" but not "history" or any other words.
The grammar police have yet to pull me over. I'll continue speaking as I do, thank you.
There is nothing wrong with the use of ‘an’ before ‘history’ and the forms of that lemma. It is unusual, and perhaps pretentious or otherwise silly, but only in the same way as ‘connexion’ is an unusual (&c) but perfectly correct spelling.
The point of saying "an" instead of "a" is to make it easier to say a following word that starts with a soft sound (there's probably a technical term).
"A igloo" is hard to say, so we change it to "An igloo" which is a lot easier.
"A history lesson" is not hard to say so there's no need for "an".
Have you ever said "an history lesson" or even heard anyone say that?
No. Of course not.
Not arguing correctness, just intuition.
Yes, often.
For that matter, the first day I was in Great Britain, I noticed that the other Americans I met had British accents, and I noticed in the few hours talking with them, I was already picking up on the accent myself.
It's only natural to pick up the language and idioms of the cultures you happen to be immersed in!
(And this applies to Law and Engineering as much as anything else, too.)
I would say maths has its own issues with language accessibility, but they're a bit different from law. Probably the biggest problem is naming everything after people instead of coming up with meaningful names.
I read some of the argument transcripts and usually it is a bunch of lawyers trying to sort out what the law should be given it works this way in this case and that way in that case and this one goes up the middle or the circuits disagree. But sometimes it is much more nakedly political.
It's all people's decisions, there's no magic about it.
If you pay a repairman to come to your house and fix something, even if he does fix it in five seconds, you're going to feel a bit cheated because you paid him assuming it would take hours.
Same with a lawyer - if you pay one to write something for you, or review a contract, they WILL write something or find something that makes you feel like you got your money's worth.
Careful past that Chesterton fence
> What matters is all the relevant case law
I think that the problem is trying to encode both intent and formal instructions in the same language. If a law were to state clearly "our intent is to prevent people from falling off tall buildings" and then specifying building code, then any ambiguities in implementation or new materials or new methods could be addressed by referencing the intent. This would be especially helpful in e.g. criminal law, where ambiguities or oversights in language (e.g. with regard to women raping men) often lead to both innocent people sitting in jail, and guilty people going free.
This is how American laws are usually written. Courts even venture into the debate records to discern intent.
Similar to the way it's brittle when there are money numbers that don't include inflation (either on purpose or not), or (rarely) use a hilariously wrong inflation number instead of an index (say for a law passed during a time of very high inflation). Then the numbers change (or don't), and everything gets weird.
Maybe with a new nation that had time to adapt to the scenario it could form a functional system, but if implemented in America today I'd give it a not insignificant chance of actually crashing the entire government like a computer attempting to open a zip bomb
reminds me of this: https://themedialine.org/by-region/irelands-push-to-alter-ic...
As something of a litmus test, if a crime is so minor that the police wouldn't do anything if you brought them multiple eyewitnesses, video evidence, and an address to knock on, then having that law on the books probably does more harm than good (many petty crimes like mild speeding would fit those criteria).
I see you are not American, and evidently are not really familiar with the second amendment.
I'd prefer it if previous cases had a bearing on rewriting/amending laws, rather than influencing a current case, and if the feeling is that a current judgement was not correct, rewrite/refine the law taking the case into account.
That way a judgement does not require previous case research, this does mean that law needs to become a more well specified, and unambiguous language. We have decades of classification and computer language theory to draw from, and LLMs to stub-translate existing law, with exceptions going to a dead-letter-queue for individual appraisal.
Law should be understandable by the layman, else how does someone know if they have broken it?
This is especially important in a world where precious few scenarios allow ignorance as a legal defense.
your process seems reasonable though.
It’s always an y in under-emphasis. It’s like two generations of reviewers ago, there were a bunch of defamation lawsuits and every reviewer has mimicked this style since.
(Mostly what I’m saying is that legalese is essentially natural(ish) language ‘software’ that has been developed and maintained over centuries by non-coders[1] and that most of the seemingly pointless or obtuse stuff is probably actually significant in weird edge cases.)
[1] Not by any means saying that systems code is written by non-coders! But some of it is written by wizards and becomes Deep Magic that gets repeated by less eldrich contributors because if it isn’t then the authors sometimes meet a fiery doom.
The target audience is both lawyers and laymen. Every lawyer and politician who claims that it is not worth optimizing this also claims that they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law.
Tell this to every politican that if they don't work brutally hard on changing this fact they don't want ordinary citizens to be capable of obeying the law, and that they are thus (in the view of the ordinary citizen) working on to establish a arbitrary justice. Thus, they work on destroying (in the view of the ordinary constitutional state) on actively destroying the constitutional state. So, what makes these politicians and lawyers than differ from a despicable high traitor?
… there are consequences for lawyers if they fail to do this translation effectively…
There can be no lawyer at every time you do almost anything in life, be in traffic, raise children, participate in education, purchase something, travel, anything! Do you need an engineer sitting right next to you when you turn on the light or operate a vechicle? No! You need them for advanced things.
If you argue that ALL law have to be understood only by lawyers then you are very very lost! What you have to obey, you have to understand! At least the relevant part (nuclear waste storage is perhaps not for you, I am just guessing), but even knowing which part is relevant you need to understand! Not enough lawyers to sit next to everyone guiding through everyday life that is regulated by law!
It is difficult to understand because it made to sound ominous (fucked up for everyone), that's it, see the article. Form over essence. Also evolving without effort for restructuring so it becomes overcomplicated (see article). All formality over practicality and common sense, that's why it is so convoluted, or "it’s an accidental property", mimicing for centuries.
Also don't mix up everyday language here used with friends over a beer that could be vague for outsiders - or themselves - but there ARE ways to be specific and understood with ordinary people too using the generic communication method law uses too: language. That could been used, that is being used in other areas in communicating towards layman (like doctors, I mean the smart ones, not engulfing you with latin explaining your condition and prognosis, right? Also instruction manuals for complex gadgets are not in ancient greek just for the sake of it, right, but ordinary and specific or even formal language that are still being understood by the ordinary consumer, as that is important.)
Additionally: "Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.". I rest my case.
Everyone knows (sans lawyer) you can’t kill people, steal things, run red lights, commit fraud, lie in contracts, and so on.
Regarding your closing argument, what a wonderful argument against your point. Of course plain language contracts are just as enforceable as traditional ones. That is, you cannot argue, “your honor, this contract was written in plain language therefore it is not valid.”
But enforceability is a distinct concept from (really a subset of) defensibility. The problem with plain language is it tends to be less exhaustive and more ambiguous, which while enforceable (a valid contract with force of law) will be easier to wiggle out of in court.
To be clear, I understand your point and share your desire for this to be the case. Just having worked in a complex regulatory environment (health data), I don’t see it as even close to realistic, and it’s unrealistic for very good reasons.
It's "diff" but for legal text, using natural language (well as much as legalese is natural).
I don't know in english but in french you can definitely have a legal text (say for your company statuses) and then patches when you did modify things. Or you can have the "consolidated" text, which is the text with the patches already applied (it's definitely more of an easier read as there's no need to jump back and forth between the patches).
And of course the patches can reference another legalese text, which itself can reference another legalese text. And all of these can have... Patches.
These patches/revisions going out of their way to introduce a patching logic using natural language is plain weird.
Besides these patches/revisions, I'd say the second most WTF legalese thing is that somehow, at some point, where there were already rules and laws governing what a person could and could not do, someone, somewhere (in Rome probably), decided that we could create new persons, but not physical persons: entities dealt with as if they were individuals. But virtual.
I did set up a company: I created a person. And we do shareholders meetings and vote stuff and go in front of a notary and that notary comes up with revisions and we patch the person I created by sending the patches to the authorities.
It's completely mindboggling.
For example, every german has a right to control pictures of their own self, and the way the law was worded, it already applied an idea on the legality of sharing/distributing deepfakes of regular citizens.
However, this kind of generalization requires very careful wording. Every single word and every single statement will be examined for inclusion and exclusion of situations across many court cases. This means it's hard to formulate these laws.
And then you rely on age-old, court- and battle-proven formulations... even if they are clunky and not intuitive.
Thus, an artificial eye recording -- and even recording to an SD card -- would be no problem.
And that is how a good law should be written: It should be written with the rights, duties and protection of citizens involved so it allows the judges to make new technology fit into the framework of the rights of the people.
And sure, it may fail at times. But that is what appeals and adjustments are for.
Well to add to that, representing yourself is a really bad optics and you can't fervently defend yourselves. That's why even lawyers when put on trial will use other lawyers.
Take the phrase "Open Source" as an example. Us old folk ascribe specific meaning to that term - typically based on the legalese in Open Source licenses.
However the next generation have imbued it with their own (various) definitions. This leads to endless back and forth. For example I recently pointed out that SQLite is Public Donain, not Open Source. (With predictable pushback.) Today, in other thread someone claimed "its not really open Source unless its in git, and on github".
And the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is seldom understood.
So yeah, legal documents are gard to parse because they can't take "common meaning" for granted.
Heh, mine is even more strict: to me, it's not really open source unless I can build it since if I cannot compile the project, I cannot change it for my needs and/or send those tested changes back upstream
I have a second 2nd level "requirement" about packaging it in a sane distribution format, because I don't think any reasonable person wants to have a .desktop file that is $(cd /home/src/foo; npx run whatever "$@"). I'm looking at you, Chromium, since I can get it to build just fine but count the number of hand-rolled /usr/bin/install calls https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/741f8edf84c7b... because evidently the $(make DESTDIR= install) is just kidding
Work on big technical projects like Linux was also a strong signal for employers. For years now that signal has been a target to emulate so a. Lot of “open source” became FAANG resume building.
I get where you are coming from though. The choice of the word "Free" in "Free Software" isn't ideal because the word "Free" has multiple meanings. Most people (especially non-tech users) assume it means "no cost" rather than "unencumbered".
So yes, it would have been simpler either a different name. Hindsight is perfect.
That said Free Software is different to Open Source (although lots of tech folk conflate the two.) That aside, it doesn't stop people adding their own (incorrect) requirements or expectations, as seen elsewhere in this thread.
The thinking being that the less nuanced the vocabulary, the less ways it could be interpreted and thus one may not have to write so many laywerly guard phrases to artificially constrain "normal" vocabulary. It may very well run the risk of having to use a bazillion more cross-references as one builds up a "library" of word-subroutines, but still could be a net win
But I guess I can navel-gaze all I like because for this specific domain, any change might as well be all the changes since there's no prayer
The plainlanguage.gov site is an excellent all-around writing resource. I direct junior developers here when they are trying too hard to sound fancy when communicating technical concepts in documentation and design documents.
Here are some great examples:
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/ambi...
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/use-...
well, no shit! that's amazing
Thanks so much for bringing that to my attention, I'll try to see how I can incorporate those into my own process
As a particular example, is there any reason to keep the vague "second month" in the second example [2], rather than "subsequent month" or "next month"?
[2] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/before-and-after/mont...
My friends from non English countries get very confused that somehow “next Wednesday” when it’s Monday might not mean two days from now but 8 days from now. And how two days in that instance would be referred as “this Wednesday” or “this coming Wednesday”
Which is different way of talking. If you were sitting by the road counting cars and you are at car “n”, Saying “the next car” would refer to car n+1. If your counting wednesdays you experienced “next Wednesday” technically refers to n+2
I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.
'Next Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of the calendar week following the current calendar week; doesn't matter what day of the week it currently is. 'This Wednesday' is always the Wednesday of current week on the calendar— even if that day is in the past.
Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.
> I stopped saying “this <day>” or “next <day>” and now just say “Wednesday the 25th” for instance.
I love this. Indexicals in general can be tricky, and I love expressions that rely less or very little at all on context. Sometimes when a friend is telling a complicated story I'll ask them to repeat something tbey just said but with no use of pronouns, for instance, and it always makes interpretation much easier.
As much as I think the actual idioms are perfectly describable, they are somewhat prominently misused. One of my pet peeves is how YouTube's search filters uses its time restriction phrases incorrectly: it says 'today' to mean 'within the past 24 hours', 'this week' to mean 'within the past week', 'this year' to mean 'within the past year', etc. It's Tuesday, and when I search for videos with an upload date from 'this week', I get results including videos uploaded 4 days ago, but this week is not yet 4 days old under any standard convention (e.g., starting the week on Mondays rather than Sundays)... -_-
'<term>' is always <my definition>; doesn't matter <other factor>.
Is never going to be true in spoken language. Otherwise we wouldn't be having conversations about confusion and ambiguity in the first place.
By my intuition, I'd say the uses of 'this week' and friends I described as improper qualify handily, not being all that widespread yet. A couple more marginal examples that stand out to me because erroneous uses are much more common: 'let alone' (which is binary and often used with subject and object reversed), the distinction between envy and jealousy.
You can take up a radical descriptivist position, e.g., that anything spoken by adult native speakers of normal faculties is never erroneous, or re-scope my assertions by saying that I'm gatekeeping speakers who see such usage as correct from my perceived language community or tradition, whatever, but imo the first is trivial and the second boring.
Sometimes specialists misappropriate methodological constraints from their discipline as general ontological or social principles, often discounting an inherent normativity in the way people actually relate to the things those specialists study. I think that's essentially at the heart of the most inflated and controversial uses of concepts like cultural relativism and linguistic descriptivism, and probably applies to nonspecific objections like the one you make above (as opposed to pointing at some specific dialectal variation in the use of such phrases or something like that).
Nope. This is highly contingent on "which day of the week starts a week" conventions.
If it is Sunday, then "next Wednesday" does not clearly mean the day 10 days from now ... and which one you lean toward will depend (in part) on "week starts on Monday" or "week starts on Sunday".
Things are also a bit complicated where I live by the fact that 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' follow the same pattern as I described before, but in a way consistent with calendar weeks beginning on Monday rather than Sunday— even though calendars here conventionally start the week on Sunday and usage of 'this <day of week>' and 'next <day of week>' align with that.
Anyhow, the variation you are getting at is already captured in the description I gave: as the calendar (week boundaries) varies, so does the description's meaning. The description is already indexed to a particular calendar (as is the expression, unfortunately implicitly). :p
My claim was that the meaning is easy enough to describe, not that the phrase is unambiguous. That a phrase can be used ambiguously doesn't mean that descriptions/definitions/characterizations of its general meaning actually have to be ambiguous or vague themselves.
Still yeah, this is a real problem for conversations between people who aren't looking at the same calendar/don't understand a shared convention for week boundaries.
My sense is that weekend nomenclature is even more confusing.
If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days. That is: "next weekend" referred to at any time before (possibly) Friday means "the next one to occur", not "the one that is a part of the next calendar week". By contrast, on Friday "next weekend" pretty clearly means the two days that will occur in about 7 days, rather than "this weekend" meaning the two days that start in less than 24 hours.
> If it is Monday, and I say "next weekend", I'd wager there's a greater proportion of English speakers (at least) who would understand that to mean the two day period that starts in roughly another 4 days.
To my ear, this is wrong, but I think you're right that it's more common. I think 'this weekend' and 'next weekend' are fuzzier than 'this Tuesday' and 'next Tuesday' because of that misalignment I pointed to before, where 'the weekend' is thought of as a thing that comes at the end of a week, but how we write it most calendars where I live is as a thing that bookends the week on each side.
But I couldn't take up the usage you describe even if I moved to a region where it was predominant, I think. How could I abide a situation where 'this Saturday' occurs during 'next weekend'? That's simply madness. :D
(It's amazing how much we humans manage to communicate with something as messy as natural language-- perhaps especially amazing to programmer-brained people like me, who take some comfort and ease from the simplicity and neatness of the artificial formalisms we work with every day.)
for weekends, most of the time most people are talking in ways that make "this weekend" "the next weekend to occur". so here, "this" and "next" are effectively synonymous.
for days of the week, however, it is more often important to differentiate "this Thursday" (occuring in a couple of days from now, during this week) and "next thursday" (occuring in more than 7 days from now, as part of next week).
If my hunch is correct, it would make conventions highly dependent on social scheduling frequency in a culture.
Is it quirky that this expression doesn't instead mean 'the next Wednesday that will occur'? Yes, definitely. But I don't see how it's difficult to describe what it actually does mean.
That's the way it's supposed to be, at least as spoken in the part of Scotland from where my family hails.
But the Americans I know seem to get it wrong about half the time.
What I haven't figured out is if it's a regional (dialectical) thing, or just certain people being "dense", or simply never having been taught the rule.
> Sid: Well I'm going down to visit my sister in Virginia next Wednesday, for a week, so I can't park it.
> Jerry: This Wednesday?
> Sid: No, next Wednesday, week after this Wednesday.
> Jerry: But the Wednesday two days from now is the next Wednesday.
> Sid: If I meant this Wednesday, I would have said this Wednesday. It's the week after this Wednesday.
Well, usually. I've still had conversations like this:
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Whoa, slow down there. Do you mean this coming Wednesday, or next week on Wednesday?"
Me: "It'll be next week on Wednesday."
Them: "Ohhhh! Thank you so much, it wasn't clear before."
If they name a rule after me, I want it to be, "If someone can reasonably interpret a phrase to mean two contradictory things, you have to stop using that phrase if you want clear communication, even if it means being more verbose."
I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'll put it in the calendar, the 8th it is!" and you reply with "No, I meant the 15th" -- and this reduces the ambiguity. This kind of thing would be happening in "real time", so being perfectly clear isn't as important.
However, if you write "next Wednesday" in a contract, and then complete it on the 15th instead of the 8th, and it's taken to Court ... it's a lot harder to figure out what the the original conversation was like, that led to the writing of the contract!
Hence, it makes sense to use as unambiguous language as possible when writing a contract.
Maybe because I’m on mobile?
I genuinely don't mean this in a dickish way -- isn't this, like, tautologically untrue?
By definition, more nuanced, more descriptive language describes a narrower, more precise view of reality than broader language otherwise would.
When would plainer language allow less room for interpretation?
I do generally think writing laws and other documents in plainer language would be beneficial for society, but not for this reason. Sometimes you do have to describe a really, really precise concept. "Kill" is different than "murder" is different than "manslaughter" in ways that are meaningful and important to preserve.
Although even as I write that, I guess you could say "kill", "kill a person with intention", "kill a person without intention". That's kind of what you mean by word subroutines?
At a certain point this just seems like a similarly-complex vocabulary, just with more words, though.
I am 100% open to the fact that it may not be possible to do this, since nat-lang is its own special little thing, and trying to apply fixes to it may be nonsensical themselves
The word subroutines would be cross-references to potentially more complex concepts akin to "one cannot end life (§3.14.159) unless working (§8.6.753) in a job (§127.0.1) that allows State violence" where the boundaries of what this legislation cares about 'ending life,' the boundaries around 'working,' the boundaries of a 'job' would then be composed into 'citizen cannot kill other citizen'.
I always got the impression that the nuance between murder and manslaughter wasn't in their degree of unlawfulness but rather in their sentencing, but I am deeply thankful that I haven't needed to know
As an aside the difference between murder and manslaughter is in the intent of the perpetrator. Murder is typically when you intended for the outcome to be death (and is additionally divided into whether or not it was premeditated/planned).
Manslaughter is reserved for when there was not intent to kill, but your actions caused a death.
Err, having written that out I now guess there is also some social component to it: you may still be received at a party if convicted of manslaughter but maybe not murder so we need different words to describe the act for purposes outside of the legal system
We even draw the distinction between degrees of murder since sitting down and planning a murder in cold blood (murder in the first degree) is far different than a road rage incident with a gun (murder 2) which is different still than a shove in a bar where someone falls down and hits their head and dies (manslaughter). Hell, some places even distinguish between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
The point is that all these words have meaning, and we deeply care about the nuance.
To circle back to the "if law were programming" idea, I think of all the nuances you cited as belonging in any "then" clauses, not the "if" clauses of legalese
if made_dead:
# determine punishment
if premeditated:
...
elif road_rage and crime_scene.contains({"gun"}):
# a kind of very, very slightly premeditation
...
else:
# and here one can get into [in]voluntary made dead
All this was inscrutable before LLMs, but LLMs bring their own challenges: to summarize something in plain text, is it using a deep graph of definitions that are sourced and verifiable, or hallucinating their existence? IMO architectures as in https://arxiv.org/html/2410.04949v1 and https://arxiv.org/html/2409.13252v1 are useful; one uses LLMs to create local knowledge graphs and integrate them, then translates natural language queries into (successive) graph queries or graph-based RAG approaches. Things are still evolving in real time here, and IMO we've only scratched the surface of what's possible.
You want to administer nuclear weapons, the U.S. military and toxic-waste rules based on a high-school freshman’s knowledge of the world?
I think that's why these terms exist, because they become shorthand for longwinded definitions that may need to be very precise.
Real life can be complicated and moral/legal questions can be hard to determine.
Seems like there's a lot of pitfalls there, but that comes with the territory of writing laws in general.
Seems like a concept worth exploring.
I am pretty sure there are several more but that's the one I can recall. It has been discussed here periodically https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/catalalang (and https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=catala-lang.org ) with the 2023 thread being the beefiest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37546874
If we were going to get 80 year old Senators to learn a new language, I'd lobby for Lojban which is at least plausibly designed for representing unambiguous semantics
I've mentioned before that any laws that are written in formal languages seems great from the metric of keeping "interpretation" cases out of the judicial system but would put society back into the "priests read Latin and tell the plebs what God really meant, trustmebro" and that's for sure no bueno
When someone says: "That's so random", it isn't a commentary on determinism. There are many cases where adhering to a precise definition becomes problematic in popular discourse.
Before students can learn directly from symbolic representations like formulae, mathematics teachers must communicate mathematical ideas to them using natural language -- and with just a few iterations of correcting misunderstandings, this process somehow converges on the students having the same understanding of these abstract ideas.
That is, natural language succeeds here in bootstrapping a more precise form of communication.
Though for law, I think some ambiguity is beneficial. We should be going after the intent of the law, not the letter. This isn't just about bad encoding, as in not well aligned with the intent, but that there's always exceptions. Having that human judge be there to determine if something is actually reasonable or not is beneficial, even if there's a strong bias to follow the letter.
Ambiguity means that there are two or more possible interpretations and it's not clear which of them is intended. That's hardly useful. What's beneficial, and what you perhaps had in mind, is some amount of under-specification where the meaning is clear but leaves gaps to be filled in by judges.
On the other side there may be one person that wants to have sex with prostitutes himself, another that believes women should be able to do what they want with their bodies, a third that believes prostitutes can be an important way for young men to gain sexual experience and skill, a fourth that thinks prostitution is bad but legalization to be a way of harm reduction.
Not all of these people may be willing to admit their reasoning in writing. You could say that only following the written down reasoning is a feature. I haven't thought a lot about that subject, so I haven't made up my mind on it.
I want my politicians speaking more honestly. Or at least having to write things on the record. Things in the system that pressure more honesty, accountability, and transparency are better.
They are not willing to admit it in any domain, which is exactly why we want it in writing.
It's called accountability.
What I would like to see is what harm it is supposed to prevent.
Been there. Learned eventually. Sometimes still forget. :)
Who told you forum shopping is illegal to talk about?
All this stuff is hard to navigate if you're not used to it, or haven't been involved before.
Edit: Actually we do. Skilled interlocutors like that doing their thing are how we got leaded gasoline.
This sounds like something a lawyer would say to a client who wants to think that. Law and coding have remarkable parallels.
True. But this isn’t because someone is more logical. Honestly, that was a great line by a lawyer who probably wanted to focus on the case and not bill hours for a philosophy of law discussion.
Not really. In particular, they’re both professions filled with people who have egos the size of planets. I can just as easily see a surgeon telling a lawyer that the law is logical, being designed by man, in a way the human body is not just to get them to shut the hell up with broad questions about human anatomy during a surgical consult.
(The actual parallel is they both deal with constructed languages. High-level languages are full of hacks and quirks and high-octane stupid it, just like the law.)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. A more precisely worded contract, for example, is arguably more likely to have unambiguous loopholes that people can abuse without you being able to easily fight back. The well-known reductio ad absurdum of this phenomenon is Etherium smart contracts.
You see this in laws, too. The US's Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and associated case law, for example, contain all sorts of explicit refusals to say things more precisely. The stated rationale, here, is that it's impossible for the people drafting these rules to anticipate every possible situation and contingency, and instead they must trust that reasonable attorneys and judges are able sort things out in the course of litigation.
The article then went on to say this isn't necessarily a bad thing: two lawyers put their arguments before the judge, and the judge can then decide what's best for that particular situation.
The author of the article was at least somewhat libertarian, because he suggested that this is necessary when there's a single body of Law to deal with; the other way to deal with these problems is to go with arbitrators instead -- but in that case, the "Law" would be decided between the two parties and the arbitrator, which has its own twists and turns!
What's more, the very "loophole" that enables a murderer to get away with murder is what an innocent person would use to be unjustly convicted of murder.
There are very few rules that will only permit good outcomes and never bad ones.
For instance, here [1] is a random paragraph I found in a contract that I think is pretty good example of "legalese", and here [2] is my attempt to rewrite it for readability. All the essential complexity remains, but I think (hope!) much of the accidental complexity has been removed. :)
[1] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. Each person in whose name any book entry position or certificate for shares of Common Stock is issued shall for all purposes be deemed to have become the holder of record of such shares on the date on which the Warrant, or book entry position representing such Warrant, was surrendered and payment of the Warrant Price was made, irrespective of the date of delivery of such certificate, except that, if the date of such surrender and payment is a date when the stock transfer books of the Company or book entry system of the Warrant Agent are closed, such person shall be deemed to have become the holder of such shares at the close of business on the next succeeding date on which the stock transfer books or book entry system are open.
[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books and the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when the books and systems are open.
I suspect you will end up with something similar to the original.
In your rewrite, if both the stock transfer books and the book entry system of the warrant agent are closed, the person becomes a holder on the next day when both are open.
If you search for the language of the original, you'll find a bunch of examples of the exact same language. I'm with the others that this is well-litigated language that no one wants to change. https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=161&q=Each+person+in+whose+....
[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books or the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when either the books or systems are open.
Incidentally, I think that the reasons why programmers tend to do that are quite similar to the reasons for using legalese that the paper identifies.
Legalese looks an awful lot like code (I'm a programmer) meant to cover all edge cases and not permitting subroutines. It would be an awful lot clearer if they used a single term and then defined it after the main body of the law. Put as much as possible into a global appendix--as a layman occasionally trying to look up a law I find eternal references to as defined by xxxx.
And require the state to publish a version with hyperlinks and hover text.
In my ever cynical opinion it's largely just a means of accumulating power without accountability. For instance in the terms and conditions of basically all major software now a days it says little more than "You forfeit all rights, we reserve any and all rights imaginable, and we can change this whenever want." But if it actually said this then people might be inclined to say 'hey that's not cool.' But when it's instead wrapped in page after page of incomprehensible legalese, people don't even bother trying to see what they're agreeing to.
Also if by law the user has some rights sometimes you might want to be careful to avoid contradicting them.
Overall the cost of adding another paragraph is fixed and negligible and the possible gain in loss prevention is considerable
I don't think that's an accurate representation of the Constitution. I'd that we've seen clear examples of when the plain language of even the first two amendments has not worked just fine, and resulted in harm and litigation all the way to the Supreme Court.
I think the ambiguity in the first two amendments has to do more with the specific text rather than plain English itself being deficient.
This isn't just a Constitution problem, either: it happens with all law, to one degree or another, and in all levels of government, from HOAs all the way up to the Federal and even International ones.
The issue isn't the wording, though -- it's humans being human, for better and for worse. While we can try to mitigate the problems arising from humans being human, there's only so much we can do!
At highest fidelity, and least ambiguity, is a regulation since it applies to a highly specific context, and seeks to regulate relatively easy to name and describe practices. The audience for a regulation is typically a regulator, ie., a part of the government. Regulations quantity over a finite number of institutions/bodies/practices which are generally identifiable explicitly at the time, even if the law is written more broadly.
Many socially inadept engineering types assume either all law should be like regulation, but this would be tyranny, since you cannot easily enumerate or describe the vast majority of scenarios "of legal concern", and the attempt reduces social interaction down to the worst sort of prescribed interactions.
The audience for ordinary laws is judges (and somewhat, the police) -- to guide their decision-making when interpreting an unenumerable social scenario "of legal concern". These nevertheless concern scenarios with describable features, and its generally clear at least when they apply. These "general laws" quantify over an infinite number of possible "similar scenarios" whose similarity is giving by legal precedent and developed traditions of intepretation.
Finally constitutional principles, in being "one sentence" are nothing really like laws at all. In my view their audience is a very strange sort of judge who is much closer to a moral philosopher. These principles are so radically underspecified that they can apply to almost any scenario relative to some philosophical framework.
The purpose of constitutional principles is to limit the government under very broad ethical guidelines. So the audience there is the government, broadly. They exist to deter excessively immoral government action.
As you can see each of these has radically different purposes and audiences, and none make any sense as anything like a programming language -- nor are they anything like each other.
To be fair, the Bill of Rights only works because it's been endlessly litigated, developing a large body of specific interpretaions. Together, all these interpretations would take far, far more than a couple of sentences to write out.
However, any issue of contention will be endlessly litigated regardless of how specific the written law is.
It starts to not work because of the lust for power of the people in charge of our bloated government now.
This is a minority opinion on HN, but it's the correct one.
I like to speak freely. I like knowing I can defend my home. I like remaining silent when questioned by authorities.
So if I can do those things- it's working. If I can't do those things, it's not working.
As a follow-on to that, it is still being litigated and the interpretations continue to shift over time.
For example, it wasn't until relatively recently that the Court began reading the Second Amendment in such a way as to limit the ability of jurisdictions to enact laws that prevent people from carrying firearms most places. Similarly, there is a current push to change the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as well.
Your central point is key: The Law is more about the judiciary's current understanding of what's written than what is actually written.
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
"Your child's multimillion dollar hospital bill for livesaving procedures isn't covered and you must pay"
"Police arrested you and provided no evidence, we're going to imprison you without due process"
"Neighbour broke into your house while you were grocery shopping, changed the locks and now claims to own the property"
However, I have also had people from the government show up at my door, unannounced, and these were indeed some of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
Talk to other victims of state violence under communism, fascism, imperialism or even modern western democracies and it's quite obvious that this fear is justified.
One way to frame it: "government showing up at your door" has murdered millions (billions?) of people. This is a historical fact. Not opinion. Not anecdote.
"Government showing up at your door" has killed at least millions of people. When it shows up at your door, you should be afraid because of this historical fact.
Are you denying governments have killed millions of people?
> Another way to frame it is that "government showing up at your door" very frequently doesn't end up with billions dead.
It will very frequently turn out to be very bad news for you and/or your family if the government shows up at your door, especially if unannounced, especially if they need to tell you they're here to help. A firefighter will never have to explain to you "I'm here to help"
This one isn't really that terrifying for a few reasons.
The bill is usually not available until the procedure is done, so your kid is ok.
Either you can pay a $X million bill and it's not a huge deal, or much more likely, there's no way you can pay it, so it's more of a joke than a bill.
Much more terrifying would be, we can fix your kid, but you'll need to pay $50,000 before we start. There's a lot of people who can come up with $50k, but it will be a major hardship, and it'll be really tough to get it quickly.
No, that hasn't worked fine at all.
Do you realize the amount of judicial interpretation and flip-flopping that has gone on over just the first two amendments?
They're like the poster children for being under-specified.
As a current event, look at the push to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment provision on birthright citizenship. That provision is written quite clearly, but people do not like what it says and as a result we may as a country go through a period where we ignore it.
Nor does it have anything to do with "palatability". When the Bill of Rights was passed, they were never understood to be absolute. The first amendment was never understood to make defamation allowed, nor was the second meant to prohibit towns from preventing people from carrying their guns into taverns. All of this is extremely clear from commentary and practice at the time.
Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous, as it is hard to imagine it in conflict with other rights. This is not the case, however, for many other rights.
Conflicts with other rights is a really good point that I missed.
> Birthright citizenship is relatively unambiguous
And yet it is currently a topic of debate. It's entirely possible it gets tossed in the coming years, at least until fashion changes again.
> And yet it is currently a topic of debate.
Its constitutionality and meaning are not under debate. It is quite clear.
There's a debate about repealing it, which would require a new amendment.
But there's no serious debate about the existing amendment's interpretation.
The nuance that you run into is that legal opinion defining what 'subject to the jurisdiction of the US' means (from the 14th amendment) was made in 1898, but at that time the border was relatively open.
Immigration restrictions started amping up exponentially in the 20th century, especially amidst the world wars. It seems unlikely that the court would have ruled as it did in the context of these new laws.
Plus various volumes worth of self contradicting case law and principles going back centuries before settlements were even made in the americas
Elsewhere I have specifically used the 2nd amendment at an example of why simple laws don't work.
Are arms permitted to everyone or only to members of a militia? And it's a binary, no restrictions on what type of arms.
Look at current gun law vs the wording of the 2nd, how can you possibly relate the two?? (Although in some cases I can see other laws being relevant. There are things you can possess but neither store nor transport due to the rules around hazardous materials. Top of the list: Tannerite. You buy it as two separate containers, you're free to handle it as you choose. Once they're mixed it's a high explosive and subject to all the handling rules of high explosives. You can detonate it or you can destroy it, that's it. Also, high power amateur rocket motors. Lots of rules about storing and transporting them that are simply impossible for many users--think about what would happen in a fire.)
The language in both the federal and state debt collection laws was so ambiguous that my research only lead me to consumer agencies saying I needed to ask an attorney. Or, I would find court cases where both sides argued over the language but the settlement did not alter the law, so I would have to litigate when push came to shove.
I stood my ground with the debt collector on refusing to pay interest on medical debt after paying off said debt, but they never admitted I was right, and I am still baffled by their arguments that only an attorney could navigate.
It does not matter what the law says, you always have to litigate if you want to force another party to do what you want. If the law says it and they don't do it, you have to. If case law confirms it and they don't do it, you also have to. Commonly referred to as the 90% of the law: they have what's yours, but it's up to you to put in the effort to prove it and get anything back at all
Judges never alter law made by the legislator, in any (trias politica) legal system that I know of (Netherlands mainly, but also what I read of UK law and friends), but in all of the aforementioned: the case law is an important aspect of your obligations and rights. One refers to it as basically equal to law, but it doesn't alter the law itself
1. They can determine the law does not apply
2. They can decide the law collides with another, higher ranking law and so does not apply
Both don't really do anything unless the other judges start to agree with them, in which case people stop bringing the cases because they know they'll lose.
The cost of fighting the case is almost always way more than the value of the case, so they'll avoid fighting it if the outcome is pretty well determined. This is one case where you have an advantage; you can defend yourself pro se (and likely lose) but the very cost of attacking your pro se defense is often way more than the value they get from you.
> In the legal world, however, this assumption does not hold. This is because unlike the laws of nature, political laws are not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion.
The Myth of the Rule of Law
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-JhqpU3_0r_HL06hP-5DABhEtG...
The idea that the law is, or should be, a canonical set of propositions is the real "myth" here, one espoused by people who haven't thought for a moment how such a set of propositions could ever be constructed.
Among the features identified as more common in legal documents, one stood out as making the texts harder to read: long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences.
[..]
“For some reason, legal texts are filled with these center-embedded structures,” Gibson says. “In normal language production, it’s not natural to either write like that or to speak like that.”
- notice how there's a definition right in the middle of the article, and not at the beginning.
Anyhow, there is a specific reason for having a definition not in chapter 1, article 1 (definitions) but somewhere down in article 15; lexical scope. That definition is not meant to be used in article 8 or 64, where the same word or phrase may be interpreted "as normal" (that is, still as a legal term, but not the one from article 5).
This research seems to ignore that there are different styles of legal texts; you'll find that the civil code of any country is usually written in a different (more modern) style than the ancient "thou shalt not kill" bits of the penal code. Even if new crimes are added, those will be written in the same ye olde style, rather than an updated one (with definitions in chapter 1). Also, legal texts dealing with finance tend to be written in a different style from legal texts pertaining to consumer protection.
The criticism is of sentence structure, not document structure.
> That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand.
> ...
> “When writing laws, they did a lot of center-embedding regardless of whether or not they had to edit it or write it from scratch. And in that narrative text, they did not use center-embedding in either case,” Martinez says.
How can such a study explain "why" legal documents "are written in an incomprehensible style?" Seems to me it would only tell you that legal documents conventionally have a particular style that even laymen are aware of an know how to mimic.
If you wanted to get at the "why," I'd think you'd need to do historical analysis and talk to and test lawyers instead of laymen.
As a programmer this seems like essential information to know, right? In code I can write "asdf" on the line and if it's still used it fails to compile or throws a runtime error but in law there is no such thing. And there is no incentive to simplify it.
The law is written in higher-level languages, and the courts are the compilers. It's just that most written laws probably never go through the compilation stage, until it becomes a problem for someone.
It assembles and organizes all the laws, removing anything that has been repealed.
So if you're looking at a codified version, then you know it hasn't been repealed as of its publication.
I don't know how often the codified versions get updated, and therefore how long of a lag there can be.
Any lawyers here?
This is not the whole scope though: perhaps a court opinion invalidated some law but the legislature hasn't gotten around to removing it. Or perhaps some new interpretation keeps means a law's applicability has changed (this happens a lot with laws that are pre-internet).
Sometimes there are old laws that were superseded but never repealed due to obviousness: Laws allowing redlining, penalties for witchcraft, that sort of thing. Though that's more likely at the local level than state.
Just looking up the laws on the books is not _that_ helpful to knowing is a specific part applies to you.
PS: Laws are generally codified yearly in the US, except the feds who do it a few times a year. States have 'session laws' that are a running collection. These are a pain to 'merge' into the laws, hence Lexis and West having big budgets and large work forces doing it.
Codes aren’t just lists, not in any state I’ve been in. And annotated codes exist to expand on the case law.
So you need to work essentially from cases that have gone through at least court case. That's called an appeal, and it already exists.
A) it’s amazing anyone at all is confident about anything
B) it’s amazing how bad the states and feds are at getting this information out in any usable form
C) it’s amazing how complex the problem domain is and how many exceptions to exceptions to the rules there are
D) if you might go to jail over it, you probably want to be paying a lawyer to look it over
What are you pointing at? If it’s in the code, it’s a law. If you’re reading a random bill from who knows when, no, there isn’t an easy answer, it would be like pulling a random git commit and asking what has been rewritten.
Can't do your own taxes if you don't speak accounting, you have to pay somebody.
Can't represent yourself in court if you can't even comprehend what's being said, either.
This is exactly why I write code that nobody can understand. Can't get fired.
I think you see it with more complex subject matter because you have more tangents shooting off. It means the writer needs to think ahead and do more mental work in order for the sentences to be read more easily. It was also more burdensome to edit your manuscript back then, so you had physical as well as mental friction.
By communicating in the “expected” way, you are communicating that you are part of the in group.
As a side note, writing for a broad audience is harder than writing stylistically. You have to not only understand all the concepts involved, but you have to be able to accurately convey those concepts in simple sentences without the use of jargon. I believe this is a rare skill.
In academia, for the last few years there has been a push for Plain Language Summaries (PLS) as an accompaniment to traditional abstracts. This is a step in the right direction IMO, because many people don’t even bother reading the paper, or give up quickly, if it’s overly obtuse.
Law could take a lesson from this.
You need a cryptography library implementation for language X:
- Crypto implementation for language X doesn't exist
- You try to read papers defining the crypto scheme.And they use variables like K and phrases like "oh this is from the group G"
- You spend weeks trying to understand what G and K are.
- You finally implement the crypto algorithm in language X
Academic cryptographers that write papers and no code:
Only "academic cryptographers" have the right to implement crypto schemes.
It's very frustrating working on cryptography schemes in obscure languages and their are no ready libraries.
And reading original papers often feels like there is alot of proactive gate keeping.
But often FFIs pollute the reason one chooses to use obscure languages.
Always use the battle tested implementation.
Power analysis, timing attacks, acoustic cryptanalysis, etc... there's many forms of side channel attacks that can be used to defeat a theoretically sound cryptosystem.
A) Implement this off-the-shelf cryptosystem based on the public documentation about it.
B) Given this cryptosystem and these hints, find and exploit a vulnerability.
Surprisingly, I found the type A problems harder — because the documentation was always missing some critical knowledge you were just supposed to know.
Its like saying that carpenters are using their toolkit to merely signal professionalism.
In fact the same ambiguity applies to in certain cases to the original post (see my other comment). If people are forced to use a certain communication technology / form by technical or legal reasons then this is not a good example of in-group/out-group. Such examples are much better served by discretionary choices.
It's only the core hard sciences that use LaTeX. Mathematics, computer science, physics, part of statistics, part of economics, part of engineering. When you move away from this core to e.g. chemistry, biology, applied physics, then it's all MS Word.
Have you, like, tried to write an academic paper without LaTeX? It’s only in the past few years that viable alternatives (Sile, Typst) have been available, and they all owe a lot of their design to LaTeX.
LaTeX made quality typesetting readily available to non-typographers. It’s the opposite of gatekeeping.
Not only does it mean you understand your field, but it also means that you have developed your personality to look at things from an outsider's perspective.
You have matured to be empathetic.
This is also why having kids is a major step in being mature. You have to explain things from their perspective.
I think you misunderstood my point completely lol.
The longer and more complex the contract, the greater the burden of enforcement by the state. Since long and impenetrable contracts impose a cost on the court system, they should be taxed.
If no "contract registration tax" is paid at the time the contract is signed, the contract should be considered null and void.
Contracts could still be kept secret under this scheme. Register the SHA256 hash of the contract, alongside its length in characters, in a government database.
One welcome effect of such a tax: You'd eliminate, or greatly abbreviate, those long EULAs whenever you sign up for an online service.
I don't think legalese is actually useful, I think it's just a bad habit.
I wonder if people would try to get around length limits by referring to other, existing contracts or clauses. Would we wind up with npm, but for contracts?
We'd want to have certain well-chosen "primitives" defined, at least. What a "person" is, etc.
A sign that this is working is that breach of contract doesn't show up in the supreme court very often. The big legal battles involving major corporations are usually regulatory, copyright or patent disputes wherein the parties were opposed even before the thing the case is about happened.
See OP. There seems to be this thing called "legalese" that makes contracts harder to understand than necessary.
In any case, if litigation risk is a major cost of a contract, then people drafting contracts will incorporate that factor alongside character length.
Overall, I think you may have a point. So my updated take is: Make the per-character tax low enough that it's not a factor for B2B contracts where it's standard for lawyers on both sides to review. However, make it high enough so that it's a factor in rental contracts, employment contracts, and EULAs, where at least one party typically doesn't retain a lawyer.
Normal commercial purchase contracts don't need the added insurance that offers. And no one wants to pay for it.
Having been involved in the negotiation and signing of many, many commercial purchase contracts (primarily in the US), I have never seen one be notarized. This includes at three giant publicly-traded companies and at three venture-funded startups.
Notaries exist to verify identity. If identity verification wasn’t an issue. They might not be necessary.
There are probably other ways of accomplishing the same thing.
Also it's sort of moot, the notary effectively just puts a stamp on it. If I write up a quit claim deed, there exists no mechanism to prove my ownership of that anyways
The exception I dare say are the UK and US.
The legal tradition in the west largely stems from the Roman Iius civile. Even the so called common law. And there too we see a role for civil officers to authenticate real estate transactions.
So... your statement is false
Can anyone provide an example sentence from a legal source with center embedding? Multiple examples, ideally?
It is maddening that so much of the article is about this, but they refuse to actually show it to us.
> The paper offers this as a more understandable alternative, with the definition separated out:
> “In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’ This includes the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof.”
https://bcs.mit.edu/news/objection-no-one-can-understand-wha...
In the revised version, I'm now very unclear whether Section 3a payments apply to the first sentence or not. The original makes it crystal-clear that they do; the revised version almost suggests they don't, since they were explicitly added to sentence 2 but not sentence 1.
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It is understood by Lessees, standing liable for violating obligations inter se, hereinbefore set forth in Clause 3 of this real estate agreement, that Lessors shall be exempt from liability for any damages, to the maximum extent not prohibited by law, unless Lessors knew of the possibility of such damage and acted with scienter. Lessee's aggregate liability inter se for all claims, including those based on tort or statutory liability, is limited to $1000 by this agreement. Personal injury damages, limitations of liability of which, excepting those for emotional distress, this jurisdiction prohibits, are not affected by the foregoing provisions.
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"So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of United States federal laws over time"² clarifies what these researchers count as center-embedding:
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Center-embedded clauses.
Plain-language guidelines discourage the use of "convoluted" sentences, particularly those that are "loaded with dependent clauses" and which separate the "essential parts" of a sentence from each other (i.e. the subject, verb and object). The most notorious examples of such sentences contain center-embedded structures, in which a sentence or clause is embedded within the center of another sentence or clause ("all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the 'Total Payments'"). Center-embedded structures cause processing difficulty for readers (Gibson, 1998) and have been shown to inhibit recall of legal content relative to clauses that have been un-embedded into separate sentences (Martinez, Mollica, & Gibson, 2021). Here we calculated the percentage of sentences in each corpus containing a center-embedded clause. We coded a sentence as containing a center-embedded clause if a predicate dependent clause as parsed by Stanza (i.e. clausal subjects, clausal complements, open clausal complements, adjectival clauses, and adverbial clauses) was followed by a word as opposed to an end-of-sentence punctuation mark.
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Most examples I've found seem to focus more strictly on constructions along the lines of:
The ice cream{that the boy [that the girl liked] bought} melted.³
As opposed to this one, which is not center-embedded:
The girl{that likes the boy [that bought the ice cream] } sang.
I'm not sure exactly how strict the definition of a center-embedded clause is meant to be. If it does mean only a phrase embedded within another phrase of the same type as described in the Wikipedia article, then aren't Martinez, et al. taking some liberties with it? Or is it really a broader concept than that?
Going back to the second paragraph of this comment, "including those based on tort or statutory liability" seems especially out of place. Does a mere parenthetical phrase -- and not a particularly disorienting one at that -- really count? It isn't a recursive relative clause of the kind I see people use to illustrate center-embedding.
The supporting information for "Even Laypeople Use Legalese"⁴ has what I assume are more examples of center-embedding according to these researchers (in the statutes linked):
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Any person who trafficks in marihuana by knowingly or intentionally manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or cultivating or possessing with intent to manufacture, distribute, dispense, or cultivate, or by bringing into the commonwealth a net weight of fifty pounds or more of marihuana or a net weight of fifty pounds or more of any mixture containing marihuana shall, if the net weight of marihuana or any mixture thereof is [ . . . ] [f]ifty pounds or more, but less than one hundred pounds, be punished by a term of imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two and one-half nor more than fifteen years or by imprisonment in a jail or house of correction for not less than one nor more than two and one-half years.
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1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00100277220005...
2. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hpxqu
3. https://www.polyu.edu.hk/cbs/sjpolit/classes/cbs516/psycholi...
4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2405564121/suppl...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Type_Logical_Syntax/ML7...
The name center embedding comes from the fact that the relative clause is embedded after the nominal subject head and before the VP.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Narrative_Complexity/-u...
Consider sentences 1 and 2 below. The first is right branching, the second center embedded.
1. The man drove the car that hit the dog that died.
2. The dog the car the man drove hit died.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Human_Language/Xr60DwAA...
A well-known construction is center embedding, where several (of the same type of) structures nested inside one another make sentences increasingly difficult to process. . . .
(7) a. The intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered the administrator [who lost the medical reports].
b. The administrator [who the intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered] lost the medical reports.
Sentence (7b) has been shown to be considerably more difficult to process . . .
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encoding_and_Navigating...
[An example of multiple center-embedding that tends to be prohibitively confusing]:
The patient the nurse the clinic had hired admitted met Jack.
[An example of a sentence "with two degrees of center-embedding" that "can still be comprehended under certain conditions"]:
The reporter who everyone that I met trusts said the president won't resign yet.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Origins_of_Grammar/...
'The typical center-embedded clause is a relative clause' (p. 374). One firm constraint is 'Double relativization of objects (The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt) does not occur (p. 365). An example of a centre-embedded clause (underlined here) at depth 2 (C^2) in Karlsson's notation) is "She thought that he who had been so kind would understand." This is centre-embedded because there is material from its superordinate clause before it (he) and after it (would understand). . . .
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Others not quoted:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/English_Grammar/Lem4miC...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclopedia_of_Languag...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Syntax/1U4gAwAAQBAJ?hl=...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Handbook_of_Linguis...
Everyone interacts with law at some point, it is unavoidable. And since legalese can be impenetrable, you just have to hire a lawyer. This bakes in their societal necessity and guarantees fees for lawyers if all kinds.
But what if people just imitated the writing style of existing laws, but not with the intention to make it authoritative but because that is what they understood their task to be?
There's been centuries of legal disputes, in both civil and criminal cases, and judges have over time through their rulings have influenced what is the acceptable wording to enforce whatever it is legislators intended for a particular law. When judges render a verdict, it becomes case law, and although that itself is regarded as part of the law, where there's ambiguity, over time, legislators have been prone to abrogate laws with more exact wording.
This is reflected in the tendency for judges to fall in groups that favour one way of interpretation over another, like Intentionalism, Purposivism, Textualism etc. The fact that statutory construction is something that is almost exclusively driven by judges themselves seems also pretty important when studying the language of the law and it's kind of absurd they ignore it in this study.
Anglosphere applies Common Law but that is not the case across the rest of the world. It is very much a 'style' expectation irrespective of an attempt to precision (which it often lacks).
I would even argue that Common law countries follow simpler legal language because of an inherent pragmatism when compared with Civil Law.
If we look at the legal output from countries that directly or indirectly are influenced by old 'cathedra' university heritages (old French, Italian legacy or influence) it is far more convoluted IMO.
But also the idea of distance to create authority is interesting. In symbols through history, power lives behind the veil: in the veiled faces of monarchs, in the secrets, in their 'inaccessibility' to 'commoners'. As if these walls create something that would perhaps otherwise not exist? Interesting :)
They use the example of DUI laws. Here's two. There's nothing particularly complicated about them, and the "center embedding," to the extent it is present, is entirely comprehensible.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/169a.20
Particularly clear both to the layman and to officers of the court.
The paper notices the fact but draws the completely wrong conclusions.
The article says "researchers plan to analyze British laws to see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction." Not in the last half century or so. I cannot recall having read any older legislation recently.
Legislative language doesn't have to be this way, but Americans are weirdly impressed by prolixity, and love writing phrases like 'in order to' instead of just 'to', or 'at this time' instead of 'now.'
Also the American legal code is horrendously overgrown (not comparing it to other countries here, just on its own terms). Plato warned that when laws are so many and complex as to be incomprehensible to the average person, tyrants would exploit the resulting disillusionment with law to the detriment of the public.
Center embedding—embedding a definition of a subject or object in the middle of a sentence—is hard to read but makes it harder to argue that a particular definition doesn’t apply to a particular sentence. For many hard to read constructions, you can probably achieve the same result in a way that’s easier to read while being just as hard to attack, but that might take more analysis during the writing.
Still, I am aware of cases where complexity has been used as a mean of power. Some languages have for instance baked in orthographic nuances and difficult grammar rules doing just that.
It would be interesting to measure the extent to which we can cut some of the complexity we find in such examples. I suspect not much, both for reasons of culture and power.
If you read Matt Levine, you see examples of this intentional ambiguity being exploited by finance lawyers pretty frequently.
https://archive.ph/tQhqB is one example
One way you can think about it is that ambiguity in contracts and laws is one more way that the powerful and wealthy can leverage that power against people who have less ability to hire good lawyers. A good lawyer will fight hard to make everyone they want clear and obvious, and everything they don't want vague and ambiguous, because they know they can abuse the legal system later to pick your pocket.
This tendency toward "center-embedding" seems similar to the tendency of developers to use long function names with embedded descriptions. I find these names highly distracting and oftentimes cryptic. Not being a "developer", I would rather names be short, e.g., like Arthur Whitney makes them, so the code fits better on the page. Then, if necessary, place the descriptions of each function in a separate section or file. Meanwhile I have learned to tolerate developer tendencies.
I like looking things up. Legal documents frequently have definitions in a separate section. In order to read a document it is necessary to refer to the definitions section. I have found that many businesspeople struggle with defined terms in legal documents. They often ignore that terms may be defined and fail to appreciate the siginifcance of the definitions.
>In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.
>To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.
It's not clear from the description of the findings that the language participants used was to borrow authority ("magic incantation hypothesis"). In fact, any number of other conclusions could be reached.
Interestingly there's a similar thing in police-speak, where things like "they were driving fast" become "the individual in question was traveling at a high rate of speed." Sort of casts a "magic spell" of seriousness and authority.
However, the style that people use in laws is mostly historical. Almost all of these are copy-paste jobs because they are trying to not deviate from existing language - which has the big advantage that it has been interpreted to mean a certain thing. Though I have to wonder what portion of these are really that and what portion are people's belief about this being the case.
If we were to do it over, legalese would incorporate more programming language learnings. Center-embedding is obviously wrong, and I have seen more contracts use forward declaration by first defining terms and then using them. I think it's good that this study points out things like these and maybe we can improve them over time.
But this point of view ignores the vast diversity of human experience and variability that has to be governed using a few words. It is not the case that every possible edge and corner case can be anticipated ahead of time, and this would, in any event defeat the purpose of trying to make the law more clear.
Maybe laws can be written more clearly or more succinctly in some cases, but the specific words, phrases, grammar, etc. chosen matter quite a lot in a common law jurisdiction.
“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law
This research also seems to be a little bit shallow. There is a lot of existing scholarship on legal language (Legal English and Legal French in Anglophone countries, Juristische Fachsprache in German, etc.). Maybe the underlying paper addresses this already, but the article makes it seem as if this is all groundbreaking.
Still, it wouldn’t shock me if legal language is an unusual in how much of its incomprehensibility is explained by the “magic spell” hypothesis.
Looking at the full text of the article, much of the analysis involves center embedding, which makes me wonder whether other features that contribute to complexity work the same way.
Full text: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Martinez-6/publica...
(And I suppose in that taxonomy, sorcerers are the wealthy: either by birth or by some form of ritual they have gained a power that causes things in the world to happen the way they want them to.)
A related but different issue applies to any form of supporting visual explanation, despite the lack of a cognitivive barrier (nb: assuming accessibility). The word must be the beginning and the end, otherwise it opens the door for disputes.
Where laws and regulations get complicated is when they are referring to other documents. The Canadian Parliament has done a wonderful job creating a user interface for the different iterations of bills, and linking them to video and text of the debates and votes. https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bills
The idea: The first duty of any court of law is to defend its own existence.
My thesis is that this first duty colors in the rest of the legal profession, including why laws, orders, and proclamations are written in a certain way.
Minor point: The article calls out in-place definitions. Useful, if unwieldly, when footnote and endnote conventions have yet to have been defined and practiced.
Preprint via SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4933363
One should generally avoid press releases as much as possible, they usually exaggerate.
Seems to me that's also how code bases become obfuscated after starting out cleanly.
Poor sloppy work. As likely to misleading as clarify.
The reality is mixed. Many legal terms have fixed meanings. But many expressions don't, and could be simplified.
Students learn to write that way because their source material is like that. And because they want to appear knowledgeable.
Almost every software engineer strives to write code in a clear and concise manner. However, usually we produce a pile of spaghetti. Why is that? We all know why.
Now, take those reasons and imagine you’re in this situation:
You’re working on a codebase that has been around for 200+ years, you don’t fully understand the code you are editing, the requirements are somewhat vague (“i know it when i see it”), people calling the shots are demanding that you make ad-hoc exemptions for them for political reasons, the coding style guidelines haven’t been updated in 50 years, and worst of all you cant compile the code and test whether it works, so you dry-run the scenarios in your head and hope you don’t miss any weird test cases.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-21/page-2.html#h-...
The issue of non-lawyers just cargo culting the legalese style aside, did they try to actually interrogate whether the plain text descriptions held up to adversarial interpretation?
Like take the plain text, hand it to a lawyer with a test case description and let them shoot holes in it.
1. Legal terminology has specific meanings, sometimes going back hundreds of years, with a multitude of rulings to define that meaning.
2. If you aren't a lawyer, don't use lawyer language in a contract. Courts will interpret ambiguity against the drafter of the contract. Better to use normal language.
Legal writing is doing just fine. It's not anything like code nor can it be expected to be.
How is this any different than any other Sovereign Citizen legal argument?
scheme is the true legalese
Most legal issues people have are have clear answers, and the AI should be err on the side of admitting it doesn't have a certain answer.
For example, "best efforts" and "reasonable efforts" have specific legal and can't be used interchangeably.
When companies create "plain English" versions of their tos, they're introducing a bunch of unnecessary exposure without realizing it
I would say that math is unambiguous.
Measurements are becoming more unambiguous. The accepted measurement of a kilogram equalling s Avogadro’s constant. Something like the number of silicon atoms in a 93mm sphere?
But the definitions of best and reasonable are only accepted based off precedent and we’ve seen in recent history precedent in law isn’t as reliable or defined as we may have thought.
Is there any language or any level of language that can remain defined across time and culture?
So long as legalese requires interpretation to determine intent and outcome it can be expected be incomprehensible.
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SECTION 1. DEFINISHUNS ‘N DAT (a) "Pedestrian" be meanin’ any geezer on foot or rollin’ on them mad skates, blades, boards, or in a chair what goes slow, innit. (b) "Roadway" be that big bit o’ street where dem cars be cruisin’, not the sidewalk where you can chill wit’ your crew. (c) "Crosswalk" be them stripey bits what you see painted on da road, so peeps know where to cross like good boys ‘n girls. SECTION 2. NO DODGY CROSSIN’ (a) Hear dis: You is well not allowed to stroll, swagger, or roll across da street anywhere except those official crossin’ zones, ya get me? Don’t be thinkin’ you can just hop in front of them ridez wherever you want, aight? (b) If there’s lights flashin’ “Don’t Walk,” or a copper tellin’ you “Oi, stay put,” you best do what they say, ‘cos you ain’t special. Ignore ‘em, and you is well outta order. SECTION 3. EXCEPTIONS N’ STUFF (a) If a proper rozzer or traffic geezer says “Go,” then you can go, blud. Proper authoritay, innit. (b) If da place is on fire, zombies is about, or summin’ else mad dangerous is goin’ down, you can cross outside da lines if dat’s the only way to save ya pretty face. Use your noggin, yeah? SECTION 4. PUNISHMENT, BLUD If we catch you playin’ chicken with da traffic and doin’ da jaywalk bizness, you gonna get slapped wiv a fine (cash money, innit). How much dough you owe depends on what da big men in robes say, so don’t get cheecky. You pay up, show respeck, and walk off like a proper geezer next time. SECTION 5. SEVERABILITEY (BIG WORD, INNIT) If da judge says some bit of dis law is off its rocker, da rest still stands tall, bruv. No wigglin’ out just ‘cos one bit is messed up. SECTION 6. WHEN IT KICKS IN When we say so, you better watch dem feet. No mo’ crossin’ streets all willy-nilly. Safe? Safe.
First Witch (intoning): Thrice the blind crow caws at night, Thrice the lantern’s waning light, Thrice again, and so we say, A binding writ we cast this day.
Second Witch (proclaiming): By yew and ash, and roadside charm, By wheel of cart and horse’s alarm, No mortal foot shall traverse the thoroughfare Except at Proper Pedestrian Passages, duly designated therein and thereto, Whereat painted lines, or lawful signals, Shall serve as solemn guide and direction.
Third Witch (forewarning): Should any soul, notwithstanding these provisions, Cross the roadway other than as herein provided, Or disregard such authorized signals or official commands, Said soul shall be subject to assessment of a pecuniary forfeiture, Herewith imposed and enforceable by the sovereign’s agents, Until due satisfaction of all fines and penalties be rendered.
All Witches (in chorus, concluding): Double, double, heed and trouble; Behold this decree that none shall rebuttle. In witness whereof, we sisters three, Have set our seal upon this fee: Any who transgress this law be warned, Within these words their fates be formed.
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*Avast! The Anti-Jaywalkin’ Articles*
*Article the First (Definitions):* (a) “Pedestrian,” says ye, be any swabbie wanderin’ on foot or rollin’ along in some contraption not be driven by the wind nor the fire in the belly of a mighty engine. (b) “Roadway,” ye scurvy knaves, be that stretch o’ land claimed by wagons, coaches, and other wheeled beasts o’ burden, not meant fer yer careless trot about. (c) “Crosswalk,” be them stripes on the deck of the street, showin’ where honest folk cross without fear o’ keelhaul or lash.
*Article the Second (Prohibitions):* (a) Let it be known to all ye landlubbers: ‘Tis forbidden to cross the roadway at any point save that which be designated by the stripes or markers. Ye do not scurry before the carriages and coaches like a rat on a spar! (b) Should there be signals or lights givin’ order to halt or proceed, ye must heed ‘em like the captain’s command. Defy ‘em, and ye be walkin’ the plank into the arms o’ the law!
*Article the Third (Exceptions and Pardons):* (a) If an officer o’ the King or a lawful master-at-arms waves ye across, then by the beard of Blackbeard, ye may cross forthwith, no penalty clingin’ to yer breeches. (b) If a dire emergency forces yer hand—fire upon the docks, or beasts run amok—ye may cross where ye must, provided ye don’t toss caution to the wind, lest ye be crushed under wheel or hoof.
*Article the Fourth (Penalties and Booty):* Any scallywag who dares cross outside them stripes or disobeys them signals shall face a fine, a forfeit o’ coin, set by the courts of the Crown. Pay ye must, or swing in the rigging of the king’s justice! Yarr!
*Article the Fifth (Severability):* If some learned barrister finds a hitch in one line o’ this here law, fear not. The rest of the Articles stand as tall as a mainsail in a gale, remainin’ firm and unbroken.
*Article the Sixth (When the Edict Takes Hold):* From the day the Crown’s seal is fixed, this law be in full force. So mind yer step, ye scurvy dogs, and cross at the proper marks lest ye taste the lash of justice!
"I'm not driving, I'm travelling" is a spell that will protect you from highwaymen who wish to extort you for using your car
Put your index finger on the top of your head, spin around 3 times counterclockwise, say "I assert my natural personhood as a freeman-upon-the-land" and burn your driver's license. That's a ritual to avoid paying taxes.
Of course none of it works. But it feels like things that work. Also our legal system is so inconsistent and there's so much leeway in what to charge and how to charge it that sometimes it does actually work, or at least seems to. So you read about the incantations that genuinely do work, then you read about the ones that people claim work and that will give you the legal equivalent to superpowers, then you get pulled over and try invoking your right to travel under the uniform commercial code as a sovereign citizen. The cop was gonna let you go anyway, you just had a blinker out, and now he's baffled by your bullshit and doesn't feel like dealing with it so he gives you a verbal warning and you go home thinking "Wow, I actually backed that cop down. This stuff does really work. Amazing."