Over on Digg this morning there was a story about a new site,
www.readablelaws.com (Readable Laws), which claims to be an upstart Wiki where users can 'translate' complex legal language into "readable" English.
From the excerpt:
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"When was the last time you tried to read a law? The actual, raw text of a piece of legislation? Just take a look at the Patriot Act and you'll soon understand what this site is about: Most Bills have complex language that few people can understand. This is space so we can help each other out."
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I feel:
While some Internet users and some immigrants in the United States (who speak English as a second or third language)
might stand to benefit from having their laws transcribed in "plain English," I think the problems with a system like this far outweigh any benefits.
The common objection to this site appears to be that a great deal of partisan "interpretations" of the laws would appear, and that it would eventually dissolve into an edit war consisting of nothing more than dictionary definitions, worse by powers of magnitude then the editing wars Wikipedia already experiences.
To me, that's a very
minor concern compared to the issue a site like this exposes; literacy. As I mentioned above, I'm terribly disappointed that there are enough US citizens with such a poor grasp of their official national language that they cannot read a simple law. The snippet suggests that the USA PATRIOT ACT is a prime example of "legalese" which is unreadable, but a simple Google search for the text of the Act left me surprised. I didn't find anything that was terribly unreadable. As a matter of fact, I think legal documents are the most readable, because they avoid a great deal of unnecessary ambiguity. A random excerpt:
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Originally Posted by USA PATRIOT ACT
`(A) IN GENERAL- If a financial institution or any director, officer, employee, or agent of any financial institution, voluntarily or pursuant to this section or any other authority, reports a suspicious transaction to a government agency--
`(i) the financial institution, director, officer, employee, or agent may not notify any person involved in the transaction that the transaction has been reported; and
`(ii) no officer or employee of the Federal Government or of any State, local, tribal, or territorial government within the United States, who has any knowledge that such report was made may disclose to any person involved in the transaction that the transaction has been reported, other than as necessary to fulfill the official duties of such officer or employee.
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If this section were to be written in "plain English," as the site suggests, what would it look like?
"Okay, basically, dudes.. it means that if they think you're a terrorist and your money looks suspicious, they can report it and no one can tell you about it."
Does that really add clarity? There former is far more verbose, but it contains a lot of exceptions and specifications which the latter doesn't have. I think
any attempt to dumb down a law so that the "average" person can read it is an indictment of the US education system, and not "those damn lawmakers" trying to obfuscate laws with complex legalese.
One of the digg comments was this:
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Thank god. Just wish the lying assholes didn't try to screw people over with loaded and indecipherable language in the first place.
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I was glad at least to see one comment that I agreed with, and summarizes nicely my point:
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The language isn't complex, it's specific. Don't dumb it down, read a fucking book.
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How do you feel about this? Would you participate in such a wiki? Would you read it? Do you feel that lawmakers deliberately make laws unreadable by the "average" person so as to pull the wool over their eyes? Or do you think that legal verbiage is necessary, as I do?