> The intended purpose of "legalease" is to eliminate ambiguity and to clearly outline terms and conditions, however it's often used to introduce ambiguity and obfuscate the actual intent of terms and conditions or to redefine existing known and understood laws.
Brief plain English would be about as bad. English with similar verbosity would be much worse. Obfuscating meaning in colloquial English is so trivial it happens on accident when communicating through text on a regular basis.
I'm not arguing that legalese is good, I'm just arguing that it's better than English, specifically because terms have been carved out over time to mean very specific things when used in a legal contract, and that provides for less ambiguity. It does require foreknowledge, but so does every sufficiently complex topic.
> "Legalese" is a programming language that allows unsafe pointers.
With regard to clarity, if legalese is C, English is dictating pseudocode to someone else who is translating to assembly on-the-fly.
> Pretty much everything we advocate against in a programming language is permitted and encouraged in "legalese".
So let's make it better! But coming up with a more specific legal language will require even more training to understand than is currently required, and that's the opposite of making it easily understood by the average person.
My own comparison would be that Legalese is like Perl. It is familiar enough that most laypeople can look at it and get a good idea of what's going on, but it's definitely easy to write in a way that is nigh incomprehensible, either by accident on on purpose. In addition, the familiar appearance of the language hides some advanced conceptual differences that bite the unaware (context in Perl, specific meanings of common terms in legalese).
A new version of legalese might be more akin to Rust or Haskell. Very specific, very exact, but it requires much more up-front learning to understand exactly how everything works and what it means.
In other words, the learning curve would be steeper but the dividends paid for learning it would be greater.
Extending the source-code analogy, a lot of legalese needs more comments saying what the code is supposed to do, so that when a problem arises the legal system can actually debug it and better determine what raw code is is accidental or deliberately-misleading.
Unfortunately some of those comments are never made, or are separate READMEs and not systematically tracked alongside the code itself.
Brief plain English would be about as bad. English with similar verbosity would be much worse. Obfuscating meaning in colloquial English is so trivial it happens on accident when communicating through text on a regular basis.
I'm not arguing that legalese is good, I'm just arguing that it's better than English, specifically because terms have been carved out over time to mean very specific things when used in a legal contract, and that provides for less ambiguity. It does require foreknowledge, but so does every sufficiently complex topic.
> "Legalese" is a programming language that allows unsafe pointers.
With regard to clarity, if legalese is C, English is dictating pseudocode to someone else who is translating to assembly on-the-fly.
> Pretty much everything we advocate against in a programming language is permitted and encouraged in "legalese".
So let's make it better! But coming up with a more specific legal language will require even more training to understand than is currently required, and that's the opposite of making it easily understood by the average person.
My own comparison would be that Legalese is like Perl. It is familiar enough that most laypeople can look at it and get a good idea of what's going on, but it's definitely easy to write in a way that is nigh incomprehensible, either by accident on on purpose. In addition, the familiar appearance of the language hides some advanced conceptual differences that bite the unaware (context in Perl, specific meanings of common terms in legalese).
A new version of legalese might be more akin to Rust or Haskell. Very specific, very exact, but it requires much more up-front learning to understand exactly how everything works and what it means.
In other words, the learning curve would be steeper but the dividends paid for learning it would be greater.