MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style (news.mit.edu)

Take the phrase "Open Source" as an example. Us old folk ascribe specific meaning to that term - typically based on the legalese in Open Source licenses.

However the next generation have imbued it with their own (various) definitions. This leads to endless back and forth. For example I recently pointed out that SQLite is Public Donain, not Open Source. (With predictable pushback.) Today, in other thread someone claimed "its not really open Source unless its in git, and on github".

And the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is seldom understood.

So yeah, legal documents are gard to parse because they can't take "common meaning" for granted.

The thinking being that the less nuanced the vocabulary, the less ways it could be interpreted and thus one may not have to write so many laywerly guard phrases to artificially constrain "normal" vocabulary. It may very well run the risk of having to use a bazillion more cross-references as one builds up a "library" of word-subroutines, but still could be a net win

But I guess I can navel-gaze all I like because for this specific domain, any change might as well be all the changes since there's no prayer

When someone says: "That's so random", it isn't a commentary on determinism. There are many cases where adhering to a precise definition becomes problematic in popular discourse.

Before students can learn directly from symbolic representations like formulae, mathematics teachers must communicate mathematical ideas to them using natural language -- and with just a few iterations of correcting misunderstandings, this process somehow converges on the students having the same understanding of these abstract ideas.

That is, natural language succeeds here in bootstrapping a more precise form of communication.

Though for law, I think some ambiguity is beneficial. We should be going after the intent of the law, not the letter. This isn't just about bad encoding, as in not well aligned with the intent, but that there's always exceptions. Having that human judge be there to determine if something is actually reasonable or not is beneficial, even if there's a strong bias to follow the letter.

For instance, here [1] is a random paragraph I found in a contract that I think is pretty good example of "legalese", and here [2] is my attempt to rewrite it for readability. All the essential complexity remains, but I think (hope!) much of the accidental complexity has been removed. :)

[1] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. Each person in whose name any book entry position or certificate for shares of Common Stock is issued shall for all purposes be deemed to have become the holder of record of such shares on the date on which the Warrant, or book entry position representing such Warrant, was surrendered and payment of the Warrant Price was made, irrespective of the date of delivery of such certificate, except that, if the date of such surrender and payment is a date when the stock transfer books of the Company or book entry system of the Warrant Agent are closed, such person shall be deemed to have become the holder of such shares at the close of business on the next succeeding date on which the stock transfer books or book entry system are open.

[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books and the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when the books and systems are open.

Incidentally, I think that the reasons why programmers tend to do that are quite similar to the reasons for using legalese that the paper identifies.

Legalese looks an awful lot like code (I'm a programmer) meant to cover all edge cases and not permitting subroutines. It would be an awful lot clearer if they used a single term and then defined it after the main body of the law. Put as much as possible into a global appendix--as a layman occasionally trying to look up a law I find eternal references to as defined by xxxx.

And require the state to publish a version with hyperlinks and hover text.

The article says "researchers plan to analyze British laws to see if they feature the same kind of grammatical construction." Not in the last half century or so. I cannot recall having read any older legislation recently.

You need a cryptography library implementation for language X:

- Crypto implementation for language X doesn't exist

- You try to read papers defining the crypto scheme.And they use variables like K and phrases like "oh this is from the group G"

- You spend weeks trying to understand what G and K are.

- You finally implement the crypto algorithm in language X

Academic cryptographers that write papers and no code:

Only "academic cryptographers" have the right to implement crypto schemes.

It's very frustrating working on cryptography schemes in obscure languages and their are no ready libraries.

And reading original papers often feels like there is alot of proactive gate keeping.

Have you, like, tried to write an academic paper without LaTeX? It’s only in the past few years that viable alternatives (Sile, Typst) have been available, and they all owe a lot of their design to LaTeX.

LaTeX made quality typesetting readily available to non-typographers. It’s the opposite of gatekeeping.

Not only does it mean you understand your field, but it also means that you have developed your personality to look at things from an outsider's perspective.

You have matured to be empathetic.

This is also why having kids is a major step in being mature. You have to explain things from their perspective.

I would say that math is unambiguous.

Measurements are becoming more unambiguous. The accepted measurement of a kilogram equalling s Avogadro’s constant. Something like the number of silicon atoms in a 93mm sphere?

But the definitions of best and reasonable are only accepted based off precedent and we’ve seen in recent history precedent in law isn’t as reliable or defined as we may have thought.

Is there any language or any level of language that can remain defined across time and culture?

So long as legalese requires interpretation to determine intent and outcome it can be expected be incomprehensible.

I wonder if people would try to get around length limits by referring to other, existing contracts or clauses. Would we wind up with npm, but for contracts?

We'd want to have certain well-chosen "primitives" defined, at least. What a "person" is, etc.

A sign that this is working is that breach of contract doesn't show up in the supreme court very often. The big legal battles involving major corporations are usually regulatory, copyright or patent disputes wherein the parties were opposed even before the thing the case is about happened.

Anglosphere applies Common Law but that is not the case across the rest of the world. It is very much a 'style' expectation irrespective of an attempt to precision (which it often lacks).

I would even argue that Common law countries follow simpler legal language because of an inherent pragmatism when compared with Civil Law.

If we look at the legal output from countries that directly or indirectly are influenced by old 'cathedra' university heritages (old French, Italian legacy or influence) it is far more convoluted IMO.

Also if by law the user has some rights sometimes you might want to be careful to avoid contradicting them.

Overall the cost of adding another paragraph is fixed and negligible and the possible gain in loss prevention is considerable

I don't think that's an accurate representation of the Constitution. I'd that we've seen clear examples of when the plain language of even the first two amendments has not worked just fine, and resulted in harm and litigation all the way to the Supreme Court.

At highest fidelity, and least ambiguity, is a regulation since it applies to a highly specific context, and seeks to regulate relatively easy to name and describe practices. The audience for a regulation is typically a regulator, ie., a part of the government. Regulations quantity over a finite number of institutions/bodies/practices which are generally identifiable explicitly at the time, even if the law is written more broadly.

Many socially inadept engineering types assume either all law should be like regulation, but this would be tyranny, since you cannot easily enumerate or describe the vast majority of scenarios "of legal concern", and the attempt reduces social interaction down to the worst sort of prescribed interactions.

The audience for ordinary laws is judges (and somewhat, the police) -- to guide their decision-making when interpreting an unenumerable social scenario "of legal concern". These nevertheless concern scenarios with describable features, and its generally clear at least when they apply. These "general laws" quantify over an infinite number of possible "similar scenarios" whose similarity is giving by legal precedent and developed traditions of intepretation.

Finally constitutional principles, in being "one sentence" are nothing really like laws at all. In my view their audience is a very strange sort of judge who is much closer to a moral philosopher. These principles are so radically underspecified that they can apply to almost any scenario relative to some philosophical framework.

The purpose of constitutional principles is to limit the government under very broad ethical guidelines. So the audience there is the government, broadly. They exist to deter excessively immoral government action.

As you can see each of these has radically different purposes and audiences, and none make any sense as anything like a programming language -- nor are they anything like each other.

To be fair, the Bill of Rights only works because it's been endlessly litigated, developing a large body of specific interpretaions. Together, all these interpretations would take far, far more than a couple of sentences to write out.

However, any issue of contention will be endlessly litigated regardless of how specific the written law is.

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

No, that hasn't worked fine at all.

Do you realize the amount of judicial interpretation and flip-flopping that has gone on over just the first two amendments?

They're like the poster children for being under-specified.

Plus various volumes worth of self contradicting case law and principles going back centuries before settlements were even made in the americas

Elsewhere I have specifically used the 2nd amendment at an example of why simple laws don't work.

Are arms permitted to everyone or only to members of a militia? And it's a binary, no restrictions on what type of arms.

Look at current gun law vs the wording of the 2nd, how can you possibly relate the two?? (Although in some cases I can see other laws being relevant. There are things you can possess but neither store nor transport due to the rules around hazardous materials. Top of the list: Tannerite. You buy it as two separate containers, you're free to handle it as you choose. Once they're mixed it's a high explosive and subject to all the handling rules of high explosives. You can detonate it or you can destroy it, that's it. Also, high power amateur rocket motors. Lots of rules about storing and transporting them that are simply impossible for many users--think about what would happen in a fire.)