Jinn

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:

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:

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:

I was glad at least to see one comment that I agreed with, and summarizes nicely my point:

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?

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Cynthetiq

No, I would not use it.

Words are already parsed for interpretation as they are in the Bible, Torah, Koran, and Civil, Naval, Criminal Law.

I see this as just obfusicating the situation more.

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Halx

I think its good. I'm not dumb, but my attention span is short. I wouldn't call laws specific, I would call them cryptic. Many laws need an appendix to be understood without context. I would hope that the translated laws didn't all start with "Ok dudes." I think the best way to do this would be to provide line by line translations, instead of summarizing them. Summaries are worse than the original text because there are intricacies that need to be understood.

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Jinn

I don't see this happening in practice; as an apt example, the first line of my quoted section of the PATRIOT ACT:

How would you "translate" this line? Perhaps I am limited by my own vocabulary, but I cannot conceive of a way to make this more readable without removing necessary information (like who is involved, or why they would report). Any 'explanation' of this line beyond word substitution would end up more verbose than the original line, and would likely take the space of an average paragraph. That seems to be in direct contention with your desire for something which requires a shorter attention span.

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Infinite_Loser

^"If a financial institute or anyone employed by a financial institute either voluntarily or accordingly to this law or any law of the same stature reports a suspicious transaction to a government agency then..."

Or

"If anyone affiliated with a financial institute reports a suspicious transaction to a government agency then..."

Seems close enough to me.

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Jinn

And that's exactly what I mean. It's NOT close enough.

There are a dozen issues exposed by your 'translation', but the most obvious is your usage of the word "affiliated." Case law provides varying degrees of definition for "affiliated," but the first I could find was:

By your "translation," you've now added any person who works with or works at any place controlled by the financial institution, any company which is in common control with the institution, and a handful of other "affiliated" companies, which were previously not subject to this protection as the law was written.

I say again that there is a very important reason that the precise wording of legal documents must not change, as it adds AND removes very important implications that could mean the difference between a judgment against you for hundreds of thousands of dollars and immunity under a given law.

It is typical in common debate to pick an individual sentence into two or three dependent clauses. If one of the clauses is demonstrably false, then it can falsify the entire sentence (and perhaps the entire law).

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The_Jazz

This seems like a way to make the very precise much less so.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but IL's attempt shows how dangerous this could be.

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Infinite_Loser

That's easily remedied by adding the word "directly" in front of "affiliated". It's not as if laws are written in a way as to where it's absolutely impossible to clarify them without being overly verbose.

*Shrugs*

So what did you think of my first interpretation?

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robot_parade

Well, the site you linked to isn't loading for me right now, so I can't comment on it specifically. However, I think 'something like it' is probably a good idea, with lots of potential problems.

Here's the text of the patriot act:

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html

Any one part of it may be hard to understand, but it's *long*. And not really all that long compared to a lot of other laws. What does it mean? A good, scholarly non-partisan (as if there were such a thing) interpretation of the highlights of the law, how it is likely to apply and affect most people, and explanations of some of the more technical terms would be great. Also a discussion of where it fits in the context of existing laws would be a great benefit.

I agree with you that the language in laws is not usually overly complicated. It is just very specific, and very technical. Especially in the sense that the words used have very specific legal meanings that aren't necessarily what you expect. For instance, the word 'agent' in the part you quote - that term has a very specific meaning (and I don't know what exactly it is offhand).

However, as someone who wants to know 'What does the patriot act say', even if I spent an hour or more very carefully reading it, I probably wouldn't really understand it because I don't have the legal training or the context to interpret the ramifications.

A great case in point is the telecommunications act that's going through congress. The administration/right wing people say "This bill let's us spy on terrorists. Anyone who votes against this bill is voting to prevent our intelligence agencies from being able to listen to terrorists." The left-wing people say "Our agencies already have all the tools they need to spy on terrorists. This bill lowers the protections on our civil liberties, and at the same time, gives telephone companies immunity for breaking the law in the past."

Who do I trust? Do I have to read and interpret every single law that has and will be passed?

Personally, on this issue, I trust the people from the left. First, because this administration is clearly dangerous and harmful to everything I hold dear in the US, and I don't trust them at all, and second, because I haven't found a single voice on the right that doesn't strike me as completely insane. Really. I've looked. Not to threadjack, but if anyone knows of a reasonable voice on the right, please let me know.

To get back to the actual point, the problem I see with this site is only highly qualified people can interpret these laws properly, and it's impossible to say what the qualifications of the posters might be. Add to that the highly partisan nature of political discourse...I really don't see how they can end up with anything useful.

Jinn

For comparison:
You asked, so I will reply. It might seem like semantic difference to you, but in systems of law, words are everything.

In this case, you've omitted the "agent" specified in the original, by your use of "employed by." Agents are "person(s) authorized to act for and under the direction of another person when dealing with third parties." This wouldn't necessarily fall into "employees of the institution", particularly because agents are explicitly not employees of an institution when they are compensated by a third party. In your wording, an employee for another company which did consulting work with the financial institution would be able to disclose the investigation, whereas in the original wording they would not be able to.

The biggest problem, though, is that you actually didn't make it any more clear, or any more terse. If I necessarily omit your use of "then..", both sentences are 33 words. I think yours is MORE confusing, because you'd now have to add entries to an appendix to define your usage of the word "stature" and "employed," if you wanted it really to mean the same thing.

The necessity for a site like this could easily be quashed by simply creating a site with legal definitions of words. In my opinion, legal documents are NOT complicated. They're English words arranged in very familiar and structured ways, and provide an exact and binding rule of law.When we "interpret" it by rewording it, we absolutely change the meaning and defeat the purpose of disseminating the meaning of our laws.

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Halx

A primer for reading laws is not going to be very effective. This site will provide better access to laws than the average person has. Yes, they exist on the net already, but one more source with (ideally) more popularity can only be a good thing. This presents laws in the context of discussion.

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dc_dux

I would not rely on a Wiki-type interpretation, upstart or otherwise. There is far too much opportunity for partisan interpretations.

One of the functions of the Congressional Research Service is to provide a brief abstract of every bill when its introduced and a section-by-section summary when a bill is passed.
Summary of USA PATRIOT (link may be temporary)

Go to thomas.loc.gov ....search a bill number, and the CRS summary is available.

Probably still too wordy for some, but fair to say its more objective than any outside sites.

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Reese

An interpretation is all that can be done to these texts. We're not talking about dumbing down the laws, All it's doing is telling you what these justifiably complex laws mean to the average person. It's very easy to get lost when you're reading a very bland, complex paragraph that has 30 commas, a bunch of colons and a few parentheses. It doesn't have anything to do with the education system, it has everything to do with comprehending huge amounts of specific information. That can't be taught in school

Maybe I'm alone, but I don't trust my government. If there's some way a law can be interpreted into meaning what the government wants it to mean, They'll use it to do what they want to do. I think it's good to have summaries of what laws are supposed to mean and what they can mean if pushed to their limit.

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Fotzlid

if everything was written in "plain english", would we really need lawyers?
rhetorical question.


personally, i would check out a site like that if i wanted a basic idea of what a law says. the handful of times i've looked up specific laws, within a couple of sentences my eyes had glazed over and i lost interest. i dont find "legalese" particularly difficult to understand, its just so dry.

inBOIL

Translation: If someone working for a bank reports a suspicious transaction that you've made to the government, They're not allowed to tell you that they reported it. Neither is any government worker who knows about the complaint, unless they're otherwise obligated to. /Translation

This is not something that you would rely on if you're going to court, or contemplating activity that might be illegal, but it is close enough for general informative purposes, and helps people understand reasonably well what their rights and obligations are in this country.

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Redlemon

When I was an environmental consultant, we would frequently create regulatory summaries for our clients. The thing is, you can only dumb down the language so far before you lose the meaning of the rule. The most useful part of these summaries was that we would figure out which clauses apply to them, and remove all of the others that didn't.

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