MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

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• Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Who needs a study to understand that it's to keep lawyers rich and companies richer?

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  • orclev@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s not what the study found, it in fact disproves that theory. It’s an interesting study with results that are quite surprising.

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  • dan1101@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    My friend got an example of this recently in small town court. He went to court without a lawyer for what should have been a simple case and the judge chewed him out for not having a lawyer. The legal system is there to support the legal system. They want us to hire lawyers and to delay things as much as possible to keep the billable hours high.

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    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      They want us to hire lawyers and to delay things as much as possible to keep the billable hours high.

      It’s more that the average person is an idiot and also knows exactly nothing about how court proceedings work. What paperwork to file, what deadlines they need to meet, what processes need to be followed.

      Someone representing themselves is the surefire way to turn a simple case into a clusterfuck when they do things wrong. Missing paperwork means you need to now reschedule hearings, which pushes other cases. Missing deadlines means you fuck yourself over nothing, and a judge doesn’t particularly want to do that, so now they have to move things around to try to help you out.

      Judges hate self-representation because every idiot thinks they can do it and fuck everything up.

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• foggy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The best way I can explain this to a layman will only work if you watch anerican football.

  What is a “catch”?

  We can call a catch a catch, but unless we go further and state things like “must have control of the ball”, “must have one foot inbounds” etc etc etc, we have an incomplete rule that will allow for things we did not intend. So we narrow the existing rule, because ostensibly it is what we meant, but we need to be more specific to communicate the full idea than we originally believed.

  In basketball… What is a travel? Seems straightforward…

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• farmgineer@nord.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I also think there needs to be enough specificity to not allow multiple interpretations or inprecision, at least when the letter of the law trump’s it’s spirit/intention. This leads to very prescriptive, terse, and bewildering word salad to someone without training in that specific type of writing.

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  • orclev@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s a slightly different issue from what this study was about. Specifically this was looking at grammatical structure that’s unique to legal documents rather than specific vocabulary choices (I.E. jargon). Legal documents tend to have both, a unique hard to understand structure, as well as using words that are both uncommon as well as have unique definitions in the legal context that are different from their common ones.

    I suspect jargon is a problem no matter what, every specialized field suffers from that to a certain extent, but the unique grammatical structure is a problem that’s really only seen in legal documents. The explanation for why that’s the case seems to be potentially a historical accident and basically boils down to “because that makes it sound legal”, despite literally everybody saying they prefer legal documents written in a normal style.

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• 667@lemmy.radio ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The researchers had a couple of hypotheses for why legalese is so prevalent. One was the “copy and edit hypothesis,” which suggests that legal documents begin with a simple premise, and then additional information and definitions are inserted into already existing sentences, creating complex center-embedded clauses.

  “We thought it was plausible that what happens is you start with an initial draft that’s simple, and then later you think of all these other conditions that you want to include. And the idea is that once you’ve started, it’s much easier to center-embed that into the existing provision,” says Martinez, who is now a fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.

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  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah, when corporate and lobbyist lawyers are passing around a doc, obviously the easiest method is to simply insert their own provisions. They’re not paid to understand, rephrase and simplify the text. They’re paid to make it as complex and obtuse as possible.

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    • 667@lemmy.radio ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      In this study, the researchers asked about 200 non-lawyers (native speakers of English living in the United States, who were recruited through a crowdsourcing site called Prolific), to write two types of texts. In the first task, people were told to write laws prohibiting crimes such as drunk driving, burglary, arson, and drug trafficking. In the second task, they were asked to write stories about those crimes.

      To test the copy and edit hypothesis, half of the participants were asked to add additional information after they wrote their initial law or story. The researchers found that all of the subjects wrote laws with center-embedded clauses, regardless of whether they wrote the law all at once or were told to write a draft and then add to it later. And, when they wrote stories related to those laws, they wrote in much plainer English, regardless of whether they had to add information later.

      Emphasis mine. That’s not to say what you’ve mentioned doesn’t happen, but even non-lawyers wind up writing this way. The article is interesting and worth reading.

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• ruekk@fedinsfw.app ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Most laws are not just. They exist to extract wealth from the poors

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• Doom@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s also classism. Originally only the very high class could read, then it became you had to speak Greek, then Latin, then French, then a combination of them all. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it feels true.

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• Seppo@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I always figured it’s so the law can be applied differently depending on who it targets.

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• pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It reads like the LLM got to the middle and forgot what was at the start.

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