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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, September 06 2012 @ 01:53 PM EDT |
So, legalese is only a bad thing when it has to be interpreted by anyone who
isn't a trained lawyer (or other law-related professional)?
So, legalese is only a bad thing in about 99% of the instances when it needs to
be interpreted.
I stand by my original statement.
Legalese is a *bad* thing. It is to clear language, what mud is to clear
water.
The language of engineering is very precise (primarily due to it's dependence on
math), where legalese *pretends* precision. Having a domain-specific jargon
isn't *necessarily* a bad thing.
Ask 100 engineers to determine the weight limit of a structure based on it's
blueprint will provide the same answer. 100 lawyers asked to interpret the
legal code for paying income tax will provide better than 50 distinctly
different answers about how much the same individual should be paying.
Legalese is an example of a *bad* domain-specific jargon, largely because it
consists of a domain-specific set of language, combined with an
instance-specific set of language which will be determined by referencing
arbitrary sets of *other* instance-specific sets of language.
The current mess of our legal code certainly *ought* to put paid to the concept
of 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'. After all, it's written so that the
people most directly affected by it *can't* understand it, and therefore, by
definition, *must* be ignorant of it.
This gets more and more true as more and more layers get added to the existing
massive mess.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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