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Comment by GrantMoyer | Hacker News Reader

Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right.

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.

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That's not true at all. Law is written like it is because courts give a lot of importance to what is written and changes in these written forms have many possible consequences. This, combined with the fact that our judicial principles go very far back (starting already in ancient times with the Romans), makes it very inconvenient to change language and terms used.

This is correct. If 50 cases interpret and define the word "includes" in a contract, and you decide to use the word "comprises," you may end up burning time and money in court and negotiations.

Do engineering specifications use the same center embedded sentences as legal documents?

IETF defines may, must, shall, etc. in every document but doesn't use the same format as law.

Law and technical standards are two places where language must be extremely precise to avoid misinterpretation. And destroying Mars probes because of mismatched units.

I have two different but reinforcing memories that support this.

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!

Oh… also detectives. My colleagues say I don’t interview users. They say I interrogate them.

Agreed. My point is that engineering documents read differently than legal documents, but have the same necessity for precision.

This would be a good case for restricted versions of our commonly used languages with as few words and constructs as possible on a simple and consistent grammar. Much like a programming language for defining law.

But then a contract would never be able to describe modern day inventions, processes or procedures as deliverables lol

You could, if you treated the object deliverable as a variable, with variables defined meta-circularly via a pre-representation.

To do it, lawyers would have to learn some category theory, but I think many of them would enjoy it.

> but I think many of them would enjoy it.

Many probably discovered it already, without realizing it has a name.

There was a book written about something like that in 1949. Well OK OK I'm half joking, since the book wasn't entirely about that!

https://catala-lang.org/

In law such words are called terms of art - but most lawyers know them and there's no reason for their use to create incomprehensible documents. It's not like every other word is a term of art.

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

Really the main problem is trust and credibility, or lack thereof. Which necissitates all of these adaptations.

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.

Well said. I spent years working with an attorney who was first an English major. He wrote the best contracts because his initial focus was making things readable and obvious. The legal formalities came second. I firmly believe that plain language will avoid legal disputes better than PUTTING A BUNCH OF LATIN IN ALL CAPS AD OSTENTATIONEM.

Despite your opening sentence, you didn't disagree with OP. "Courts" are a venue for other lawyers.

There's a constant tendency here to assume other people don't think, they blindly copy what's popular.

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)

Okay, but I don't see that happening here? Like, nobody is comparing my code to legalese. And if they did, I'd apologize profusely if normal people had to interact with my source code on a regular basis! I wouldn't try to defend writing it the same way I write it when a single digit number of people have to read it ever. And lots and lots of people have to read and follow laws.

> Despite your opening sentence, you didn't disagree with OP.

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." :)

I like to use the word "superstition" to describe my attempts to prevent migraines by wearing sunglasses, eating chocolate, and avoiding orange juice. I only have vague corollaries to believe these are helpful (particularly since I don't get migraines often, as awful as it is when I get hit by one), so it's not fair to attribute any of these with certainty -- but it's also not fair to dismiss them out of hand, either.

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.

I'm pretty sure "superstition" was meant more weakly and "sometimes they are right" was meant more strongly than you're interpreting it.

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.

When I worked at a law firm that specialized in corporate law (in IT), they had a dedicated team just to find ways to exploit errors with wording and commas in contracts.

Lawyers and hackers are very similar professions.

I would tend to disagree with that, but if you’re also an attorney with a cybersecurity background, I’d love to know why you think this.

What about any sort of inspectors who try to find flaws in things, like e.g. buildings or otherwise?

language lawyer: This is using a restricted (and much aligned) meaning of the word "hacker" and not the one codified by members of Hacker News.

(maligned)

Just being pedantic and curious here: I'm assuming you're using "lawyer" casually with a "language" qualifier, not authorised to give professional legal advice, or specialising in legal language nuances?

> specialising in legal language nuances?

Hackers (in the HN sense) also excel with programming language nuances.

See also theologians and philosophers (also good at finding loopholes in theories).

The article disagrees with your comment. They found that the plainer English laws would be no less enforceable.

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.

"an historical" is because that's more fluid to pronounce, not because of a false rule.

The use of “an” with “history” is likely a holdover of its French origins where the h isn’t pronounced or from English dialects where the h isn’t pronounced. It’s essentially a learned behavior at this point. If it was used solely because of ease of pronunciation we’d expect also to see “an history”, “an high five”, “an hit record”.

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.

So you would say "an history lesson"? No.

I say "an historical event" and I also say "a history lesson".

Precisely. That is incorrect because the purpose of "an" is to make the first part of a word easier to say, and "historical" and "history" start in exactly the same way.

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.

Hah, ok.

The grammar police have yet to pull me over. I'll continue speaking as I do, thank you.

> ‘an historical occasion’ - this is wrong

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.

It is one of the few things in language that definitely is wrong.

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.

I would assume it has to do with the next word. You wouldn't say "a occasion", you say "an occasion" so then it's natural to say "an historical occasion" as well.

Not arguing correctness, just intuition.

It depends on pronunciation, not on the first letter. This is why you say "an MBA" not "a MBA". If you are from a region that pronounces "historic" as "'istoric", then "an historic occasion" sounds fine and "a historic occasion" would sound weird.

> Have you ever

Yes, often.

I like to use words like "thus", "hence", and "therefore" a lot -- but this is because, as a mathematician, I picked up a style of writing that has been deeply influenced by the mathematics I learned.

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 agree, but "thus", "hence" and "therefore" are fairly normal words. "Plurality" and the grammatical structures of lawyers are on another level.

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'm writing a nonfiction book about why people play a certain video game. It's been interesting to switch between 'I' for when I'm making a novel or specific point and 'we' when I need the first person but what I'm saying is the consensus point or common experience. I recommend the same in academic writing. I'm sure that this is a flamewar topic now that I think about it though, aha.

Agreed, I'm a proponent of using "we" in technical communication, because the "I" is not important and should not be emphasized. This goes against popular writing advice, but I don't think the advice is good.

I think this is the crux of the problem, case law exists to help 'refine' and 'classify' a case ie. a crutch for an incomplete specification (the actual law). The 'workflow' is that the judgement on the current case informs the next ones and so on.

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?

> 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.

I'd prefer to keep the separation of powers intact (legislature writes/modifies laws, judiciary can strike them down but can't (or isn't supposed to) make up law... the exchange is not that different between development and QA :)

your process seems reasonable though.

That's called civil law and is used in almost all of Europe. Common law seems quite strange, nebulous and inefficient seen from a civil law continent.

Congress can do this but chooses not to.

New York attorney here. You're kind of getting it, though put in a silly way. It's not that "vague, bad stuff will happen" it's that, in common law jurisdictions at least, precedent controls. So if you use language that has been upheld for decades or even centuries you can be as confident as possible that whatever you're doing will also be upheld. Any novelty or variation introduces greater risk of a ruling against you. This naturally creates inertia and a conservative approach in legal practice.

Nah, it's all a gentlemen's agreement, given Roe vs Wade, if you want it enough you can bend it the way you want.

On which end of Roe? The reasoning for the decision was sketchy, and Dobbs overthrew decades of case law.

All of the original case, and Kennedy's sweet mystery opinion in Casey, and then the transparently political overturning emphasize how political courts can be.

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.

Yeah, people often think there's some magical value to words, but they only have value in the political environment they sit in. If you decide not to enforce it, it doesn't exist, if you decide to over enforce it, everyone will think about it.

It's all people's decisions, there's no magic about it.

This doesn't explain the legalese in Civil case juridistictions which almost all of Europe is. There is no case that can change whether something is legal or not. My pet theory is legalese is just to sound different, authoretative and if we want to go into conspiracy theories, than it is to make sure that lay people will need you even for the simple cases.

Part of it is that lawyers are paid.

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.

Good laws should also "scale out" into unknown complexity and situations.

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.

The scalability when further out sounds fundamentally like a coin-flip with future technologies, for if it makes sense or not. Three dimensional cameras of regular citizens being covered would be a hit. But what about misses, like say if artificial eyes became a norm would looking at someone technically be a violation under the law because you are technically recording them without permission even if it is just to a small operating buffer before it is passed to the optic nerve?

If we stay in this example - and I am neither Judge nor Lawyer, so I'm just a layperson: To be specific, every citizen has the right to control the distribution of their own image. Merely taking a picture is not illegal, except for certain areas of "highest privacy", like a bathroom in your home. It only becomes problematic if the picture is distributed. For example, this is why many concerts include waivers that you agree for your picture to be distributed in the context of this concert.

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.

  > What matters is all the relevant case law

Not in all jurisdictions. And even in those places, the laws are often difficult to decipher.

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.

> 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 is how American laws are usually written. Courts even venture into the debate records to discern intent.

The intent bit in the laws is also is very brittle to changes in language. When the underlying words morph and mean different things, then hundreds of years later people kinda forget, and now we have a law that people think has a different 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.

This is why laws should sunset after some period of time, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. At that time they should be reviewed, debated again, and decisions made as to whether each law should be renewed as-is, revised, or (the default) allowed to lapse.

That's certainly an interesting idea, but i can imagine about 1000 different ways it could go wrong. Any sufficiently disruptive party could easily destroy the government just by preventing all laws from being reinstated. You could also just filibuster past the deadline for renewal to give your buds a couple days to break the law and then let it pass finally. You also would probably need a parallel bureaucracy just to handle the massively increased work load of governing.

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

Fair point. I'd like to think nobody would filibuster against popular laws such as those against murder, rape, theft, etc. but more that it's an opportunity for laws like "you can't sell a car on Sunday" or various controlled substance laws to quietly expire as public attitudes change.

There have been some people pushing for every new law to include a sunset clause, but I don’t know how you could enforce it for new laws.

Perhaps look at code refactoring as a model. Revising or rewriting code is often avoided because it is expensive and difficult. Applying existing test cases would have to be manual, not automated.

I don't know anything about anything but a good example of what you're talking about has to be "a well regulated militia" or just the second amendment in general. It's wild how different people interpret it

That may be why the Supreme Court has chosen “history, text, and tradition” for constitutional evaluation. Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a law is frighteningly Orwellian.

> Changing the meaning of a word in an effort to change a law is frighteningly Orwellian.

reminds me of this: https://themedialine.org/by-region/irelands-push-to-alter-ic...

If we didn't have a two-party nightmare willing to filibuster perfectly good policies as a tool to ramrod in alternative agendas, I think it'd work well to have laws with expiration dates. You'd have a natural forcing function by which language would be refined over time, laws would stay relevant, and the total body of legislation would stay at a manageable size.

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 don't think (all) laws should expire. It'd mean that any delay in the legislature could potentially cause a real mess. But I do think a well-functioning legislature should spend a fair amount of time reviewing and perhaps revising the existing body of law.

The budgeting process already works like this and is a hot mess. And so do other things like the PATRIOT Act, the authorization of various agencies like FAA, etc.

With e.g. the PATRIOT Act, the "hot mess" is that they just keep reauthorizing the provisions that require it. But I fail to see how it would be any better if they didn't even have to do that. At least the way things are, every time it comes up for re-auth, it also has to be renegotiated in the court of public opinion.

Yes, laws would be very easy to write if we had consensus. Unfortunately, laws are useful primarily when we don't have consensus.

I see you are not American, and evidently are not really familiar with the second amendment.

It's a lot like C++, come to think of it.

Another form of hilarious incantation in legalese are the way "patches" do work. There's a complete vocabulary and way to formulate sentences to, literally, apply patches to older texts.

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.

You think its mindboggling that some laws refer to other laws? Really??

>Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia

Careful past that Chesterton fence

But the target audience is for laymen and not lawyers because we all have to abide the law and contracts and have to sign incomprehensive text that will have punishable consequence on us! How to obey the law/regulations/rules when you do not understand? My lawer should sign all my incomprehensible contracts and be punished for violations then, if the text is for them.

The target audience isn’t laypeople. That’s why you have a right to legal representation. “Laypeople” language is way, way too ambiguous. Same reason you can’t write computer code in lay language.

… there are consequences for lawyers if they fail to do this translation effectively…

If people really cared, law would have been written in Lojban. :P

I am sorry but law is for every citizen who has to obey it, so it is for everyone and everyone have to understand not only lawyers, are you sure you know what you are saying?

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.

You don’t need a lawyer for simple things.

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.

I worked in discovery. A lot of subpoenas still request microfiche and other formats that likely haven't been used in decades. Because there's that one clinic who still uses them who thinks "any and all records" must imply "except if you think of some convoluted exception"

>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.

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.

My pet half-serious quip about laws/lawyers. Imagine writing a complex program without loops and functions, but you have access to C++ templates, and if statements can only be written as in-line switch statements that can't have any function calls. Oh and any "changes" to the code have to be done in the form of diff files that are included in the next program that may or may not be related. That's how laws are written.

Don't bad things happen anyway, via what we call "loopholes", et al? It seems like laws are sometimes written to be intentionally evaded by the lawyered class.

Well, here's how you come to understand it. You take the time to read filings, and follow trials. Trust me, it works!

Much like systems code, right? :D

(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.

It's not _written_ by non-coders, but it is _used_ by non-coders who do not always follow the way you expect them to use it...

I find there’s a similar hidden alternate semantic reality for business reviews. “Rustic” means the building is falling apart. “Bustling” means it’s impossible to find a seat. “Wholesome” means there’s no professional standards or consistency.

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.

> 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 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?

Half the politicians are lawyers, so it makes sense they'd want to protect their own interests.

The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary.

I've thought a lot about how absurd it is that the rules we must follow are so obtuse that an entire profession exists to advise and argue if we and others are following the rules. But I've come to believe we just live in an absurd reality, and there's no possible way to communicate a set of rules to everyone, or even to get everyone to agree to one set of rules in the first place, so the legal profession is an unfortunate necessity. Of course, that doesn't preclude lawyers from sometimes being unscrupulous.

I think of case law as like a git repo of every function and subroutine anyone ever wrote. So on one hand it makes sense to need a specialized education to use it (so we don't waste time arguing the same noob points over and over).

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.

Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software. Laws are programs.

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.

The problem is that the output of the program determines if you’re going to jail. There are laws that many people might break just because they have no clue that there’s even a law about that.

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.

> Writing laws to cover complex situations is really not THAT different from writing software.

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.

No, law is code.

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.

> 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

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.

The sociological implications of code is often not explored enough.

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

I'm not taking a position for or against the argument that law is code, but making the observation that it contradicts itself. Particularly in the case of the 2nd amendment. The bill of rights is supposed to be a limitation on government itself, so this isn't merely a matter of jurisdiction. In the state I reside in, I can put a loaded gun in my pocket and go about my daily business. In my birth state it would be a crime to conceal it without a permit, and in NYC it would be a 3-1/2 year minimum sentence (unless you're an NFL player [1] in which case you get a plea deal of 2 years, so somehow "mandatory minimum" changes it's meaning)

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...

Here is an example of a law that reads more like code: 28 U.S. Code Chapter 37 - US Marshals Service[1]. Maybe an appellate court could be called on to interpret it once in a while, but really it's intended to provide clear, unambiguous step-by-step instructions to agents of government.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/part-II/chapter-3...

There are literally 1.33 million lawyers in the US...

And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable.

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 :)

"(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary"

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!

Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?

Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?

No, thats yet another cartel.

Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology.

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)

Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation, no?

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.

> Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation

And smart software engineers never over-complicate their code, right?

Sure there’s definitely some of that. That doesn’t “explain why” (OP) code is complex nor does it prove there’s a “cartel” (GP) trying to gatekeep software engineering.

"wild" is not defined as as "anyone who doesn't share your perspective".

That’s why I didn’t use it that way. I used it to describe your belief that law and medicine are arcane primarily for the purpose of gatekeeping.

“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?

> Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.

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.

The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in.

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.

Except we go out of our way in programming to make everything as easy as possible. If you think about it, half the non-video and non-social media internet is just programming related, with guides, tutorials, and various tools to make it as easy as possible to get somebody doing something.

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.

> nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next.

A machine cannot be held accountable, and therefore should not be in charge of making decisions.

The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. It is an injustice if most people can't figure out whether things they want to do are legal or not without employing a lawyer.

> The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment.

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.

I suspect most people never employ a lawyer, and most people don’t go around doing illegal things.

You can learn a lot by watching or asking others.

Your fear seems unfounded.

> The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment.

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.

This is just dunning kruger effect

> Mostly, I think, legalese is a collection of superstitous incantations built up over millenia, which lawyers use because "you need to say it exactly like this or vague, bad stuff will happen." Except sometimes the superstitions are right.

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.

> 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

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.

It seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too.

> seems like we do that not only with tax law in the US, but with every other law, too

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?

I'm arguing that when court cases in the US are judged, the letter of the law (and thus all of that arcane language) matters more than the spirit of the law, while it seems to be the opposite in the EU for a lot of things.

> when court cases in the US are judged, the letter of the law (and thus all of that arcane language) matters more than the spirit of the law, while it seems to be the opposite in the EU for a lot of things

Are we watching the same Supreme Court?

I'm watching the one where they gutted the Chevron decision because they don't want officials, nominated by the elected President, having sway over how regulations are enforced, and instead want judges (who have no real accountability past their confirmation by the Senate) to do that job instead, despite them not having any real expertise in many of the fields that the US federal government regulates.

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.

In US, we have a constitutional protection against bills of attainder.

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