The best way I can explain this to a layman will only work if you watch american 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…
In basketball … What is a travel? Seems straightforward …
For this reason, I maintain that “The Lawyer” would be a more fitting nickname for James Harden than “The Beard”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most laws are not just. They exist to extract wealth from the poors
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.
Removed by mod
It reads like the LLM got to the middle and forgot what was at the start.
