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Comment by LiquidSky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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