
Ask HN: Why is law stuff seemingly against normal people? - ge96
This scary jargon that I don&#x27;t understand, ever try to read through some of these documents, some of these wordings or phrases sound so vague. It just sucks... I remember hearing about a law-AI thing.... I wonder how that is coming along.
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Mz
Like any profession, one reason for the existence of legal terminology is that
it needs to convey things precisely in a way that is not generally necessary
outside the discipline. Outsides do not readily understand it because they may
not have the legal frame of reference that requires certain nuanced
distinctions.

It also has grown organically over a long period of time. U.S. law is a mix of
a variety of legal traditions, plus historic precedent within the U.S.

Most U.S. states have legal systems that are largely rooted in English Common
Law, except for Louisiana which has its roots in French legal traditions.
However, it isn't as simple as that.

For example, water rights and laws in California contain competing premises,
one of which is from English Common Law and one of which is not. One of these
premises is "First come, first served." The other is that you aren't supposed
to take so much water from the river such that you completely deprive people
downstream of its use. These are both part of the law in California and they
are in direct competition. California alone has a very rich history in
development of water rights and laws.

From what I have read, countries that lack the sophisticated legal system such
as that we enjoy in the U.S. typically have far bigger problems than what we
face here with trying to parse the law.

~~~
flukus
Does it convey things precisely though? I seems like everything is being
constantly interpreted and even reinterpreted as language changes but the law
doesn't. Even old stuff like the constitution of many nations are being
constantly challenged.

I'd like to see laws come with unit tests, "under circumstance a, b and c,
person x would be at fault".

~~~
Someone
Every single sentence by a judge or jury is a unit test (which may have bugs
itself that get corrected by higher courts)

~~~
benchaney
No, a sentence by a judge or jury is running the program in the wild. A unit
test would be a hypothetical scenario that documents the intent of the
lawmaker.

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sandworm101
Law is a layered subject. Once you have read enough of it you hit an
inflection point where it becomes far less difficult. That is what law school
is really all about. Most all lawyers can fly through a new case or law and
pull out key elements within minutes. The language is actually not thay bad,
but this comes from someone who enjoyed taxlaw classes.

Try reading physics, maths or phylosophy papers. There too you must read a few
hundred before things start to line up.

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BjoernKW
In the Anglosphere the reason quite simply is the British Empire from which
most countries inherited their respective legal systems. The English Common
Law is about a thousand years old. It saw and weathered countless kings and
queens, revolutions and - most importantly - linguistic upheaval of the
English language, all of which contributed to its complexity and quirkiness.

An interesting example of the linguistic changes that affected legal English
are legal doublets ("null and void" for instance):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet)
Those originally were intended precisely to avoid confusion and ambiguity.
Legal doublets were an attempt to accommodate both Anglo-Saxon and French (and
sometimes Latin) language roots in order to allow speakers of either to
understand legal terms.

To modern English speakers these terms are more of a cause for confusion
rather than clarity. In addition, terms like 'null and void' nowadays add
nothing to the precision of legal language but they keep being used because
they're proven to work. They're a sort of legal cargo cult if you will.

'void' has exactly the same meaning as 'null and void' but we keep seeing the
latter because lawyers cannot risk being linguistically progressive. They
might lose a case if they don't use the terms everybody else in the legal
business is used to. Hence, legal English only changes gradually and slowly.

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PaulHoule
For one thing the law in the US derives from English common law and that in
turn is affected by the fact that English is a train crash between an old
Germanic tounge and the French spoken by the Norman invaders (who installed
themselves as the upper class.)

Thus vulgar words in English tend to be based on German roots but high-status
language (the law) is based on Latin roots.

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DrScump
Legislation is like a programming language in that its keywords and grammar
aren't necessarily chosen for its readability by laypeople.

~~~
webmaven
Not so. It is rather that they were chosen for readability in a completely
different context.

It is as if, having progressed to the point of writing BASIC, future
programmers were free to modify many things in subsequent languages to add or
modify features, but rarely could anything be removed. For example they had to
continue using the existing set of keywords.

So you have the mother of all overloading problems, for example GOTO doesn't
just jump to a line number anymore but can also call a function eg.
GOTO[foo(bar="baz")]. Worse yet, foo isn't necessarily a function name, but
might be a variable (in one of several scopes) containing the function name.
And so on.

The Law has been compared to spaghetti code. This is incorrect. It is a
spaghetti _language_. The code is often very straightforward, given the syntax
it has to be expressed in). For example the convention of declaring a variable
upon first use of the _value_ (and with a reverse infix notation at that) to
achieve indirection (eg. "...bla bla city street state, hereafter referred to
as THE COMPANY" or "...yadda yadda in Appendix II, hereafter referred to as
THE AGREEMENTS") is weird, but does make legal documents much easier to
understand when disambiguated (no arguing which "they" is being referred to).
Never mind that we as programmers would generally prefer those vars and values
declared at the begining of the document outside the body of the text that
uses them, it does work.

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raarts
The real scary problem : if you have more money, you 'll have a better chance
of winning.

This goes against the principle that all men are equal and should be treated
equally by the law.

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pizza
[https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1aqh31/is_acade...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1aqh31/is_academic_philosophy_just_one_giant_language/)

------
ge96
This is not related just whining. I'm complaining about myself being dumb in
the past. The whole internet thing is kind of a double-edge sword, like Linked
In for example. Nothing against them, they're not doing anything wrong.

I'm like "Oh look at me, I'm a dishwasher / full stack developer so and so"
and then it's like debt collectors are like "Oh so you've got money do ya?"
And also how they figure out where you live/your phone number based on your
resumes (as a possible source) which you're trying to use to get a job... damn
this sucks. I just feel scared, I hate that feeling too, like yes, I owe the
money, but also I wish I paid the OC back rather than someone who bought my
couple grand debt for tens of dollars. But why do I feel that way, is it
greed? Am I bad? I don't know... sucks to be in this position.

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nnn1234
Seems to be against the common man is right. As the other commenters have said
reasons are ,but not limited to 1\. Moat for lawyers. If it was easy to write
functional law, their wages would go down. 2\. Precise control on level of
vagueness to achieve desired result by forcing subjective interpretation 3\.
Need for precision and build of technical terms by practitioners I.e. Lingo

People are experimenting with various things from Ethereum smart contracts to
L4 a programming language for law.

I have also stated a github repo www.github.com/naveenmishra88/opencontract So
that we ccan collaborate on a crowdsourced plain English version of contracts
that work for us rather than against.

~~~
ge96
That's interesting regarding the github repo to collaborate on "...plain
English version of contracts...". I guess I just assume github is for code. It
is free hosting and a nice version control tool to collaborate with. That must
be a heck of a task too, so many documents. Wow.

~~~
beaconstudios
I would have thought that "plain-English contracts" would suffer from some of
the same issues of trying to simplify programming - in order to write a spec
accurate enough to turn into a program, you end up writing a program.

Legal loopholes are big business and making contracts specific enough that
they avoid serious loopholes would surely require the high level of complexity
used in modern contract writing.

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boyanpro
Elites (lawyers, bankers, doctors etc.) are the ones who create laws and they
do it on purpose to make lower class underprivileged.

