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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Tax contracts by character length.

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.

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The most expensive court cases aren't over clearly written contracts that have a clause for the dispute, they're over ambiguous ones. Contracts are written to minimize costs already, and that's why they're long. Legal cases are often much more expensive for the parties than they are for the US (you could have a dozen lawyers on each side plus staff, and one judge). The existing incentives favor minimizing the amount of time spend in a courtroom.

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.

>Contracts are written to minimize costs already, and that's why they're long.

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.

Legalese is a cost-reduction technique founded on the principle of making your potential future case look as much like a previous case, even word for word, as possible.

Legalese features complex grammar, anyone with good English skills and a lot of time could rewrite most laws so they are much easier to understand without losing all the cost reduction legalese provides.

Surely, your claim would only apply to contracts or court decisions, but not to laws.

Hm, interesting thesis. You should post that as a toplevel comment.

I love this! The rationale too.

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.

Yep, sounds great. How about a EULA that just consists of a few icons representing standard legal statements about what the corp will do with my data?

Isn’t this common in other countries, where a “notary” has to sign contracts as well?

In most Western legal traditions the notary is used or required in a small subset of transactions. For example real estate.

Normal commercial purchase contracts don't need the added insurance that offers. And no one wants to pay for it.

Every medium sized and larger company I know of has several notaries on staff who will put their stamp on anything you place in front of them. Typically company policy says you can bring your personal contracts to that person during work hours to have them notarized at no cost. I would assume normal commercial purchase contracts are notarized just because it is so easy to get someone to do it. (I've never been in this process so I wouldn't know, but that would be my guess)

In America, a notary stamps anything put in front of them. In other countries, they have a larger role. My limited understanding is foreign notaries represent the state in the contract. They want to make sure the contract is legal, clear, enforceable, etc.

>> I would assume normal commercial purchase contracts are notarized just because it is so easy to get someone to do it. (I've never been in this process so I wouldn't know, but that would be my guess)

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.

Are you sure - that person could just quietly put their stamp on it without saying anything. As the other poster said, in the US notaries will put their stamp on anything. In other countries they have different rules, so if you don't live in the US I could believe they don't stamp most contracts.

Yes, 100% - because as the "business owner" I've been the one responsible for actually passing the signed agreements back and forth, so I would have seen the notarization.

Strange.

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.

This is false, you don't need a notary to do real estate transactions in most of the West.

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

It's not false, it's an example of Italy and the Netherlands, and there are many more.

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

Notaries are about proving you are the one who signed it, not about what is signed.

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