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Comment by cjdrake | Hacker News Reader

I really wish more lawyers would think this way. Every bill passed in Congress nowadays is hundreds or even thousands of pages long, and filled with incomprehensible legal language.

It's as if the text itself is intended to obscure the meaning, rather than explain it.

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It takes millions of lines of incomprehensible computer language to do something as trivial as "browse the web".

Now imagine the task is "defining the lives of 300 million people a significant fraction of which is actively engaged in attempting to find any loop hole" and think how many lines THAT would take.

So you imagine that the more text there is in a law, the less likely there is to be a loophole? Do you also think that longer programs have fewer bugs?

Congressional laws aren't dense because they are intended to be obscure. They're dense because:

1) They regulate complex situations; 2) They reflect complex compromises between factions; 3) They are effectively diffs against existing law, with the excess verbiage that entails.

I'd bet the diff of the VM subsystem of Windows between 7 and 8 would be very complex and inscrutable to a non-programmer too.

I think this is sometimes indeed the purpose. I haven't verified this, but I remember reading that there was one part of the Affordable Care Act that was intended to be some pork for Nevada. However, the act didn't read that way. It was written as a sort of benefit to states which met something on the order of two pages' worth of qualifications. In the end, it ruled out every state but Nevada.

My Google skills are failing me--any chance you have a link, or at least another keyword that might bring the right page to the top?

He might mean the Cornhusker Kickback for Nebraska.

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