Legalese

[stewamax]

Given the renewed interest in teaching the basics of computer programming (i.e. coding, as opposed to using Word, Excel and so on) in schools, would it not now be apposite for parliamentary draftsmen to start using the unambiguous IF/ THEN / ELSE / SWITCH / FOR (etc) and block-structures of the better high-level languages? The non-lawyers may then have a better chance of understanding what was meant.*

Further, given that new statutes necessarily cross-refer to existing ones, it raises the opportunity to use a ‘law-oriented’ version of object-oriented structures (classes, and objects that are instances of them) to avoid unpredictable side-effects.

* reminds me of Sir Thomas More’s inveighing against translation of the Bible into English: that the words of the Lord were being turned into the language of ploughboys, his underlying grievance being that the priesthood of the Catholic Church would no longer be an essential intermediary between text and reader.

[pochisoldi]

You missed out an "UNLESS" command...

[JonE]

...would it not now be apposite for parliamentary draftsmen to start using the unambiguous IF/ THEN / ELSE / SWITCH / FOR (etc) and block-structures of the better high-level languages? The non-lawyers may then have a better chance of understanding what was meant.*

Further, given that new statutes necessarily cross-refer to existing ones, it raises the opportunity to use a ‘law-oriented’ version of object-oriented structures (classes, and objects that are instances of them) to avoid unpredictable side-effects.

OK, I'll bite and offer a few random jottings off the top of my head.

Precise definition sounds attractive at a first take but wouldn't there be a problem with the results being inflexible and potentially incomplete?

One would have to recognise that the initial constraints may not be fixed forever. With the passage of time the real world may throw up situations which were unanticipated so 'error conditions' may arise for which there is no in-built error-handling. Analogous situations can currently be handled by Courts deciding on them: sometimes they impose strict definitions on the letter of the law but sometimes they seek to respond in what they believe to be the spirit and intent of the legislation and sometimes they do something else altogether.

For example, some people have taken the view that the Appeal Court had wanted Mrs Carlill's claim against the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (yes, that old chestnut) to succeed and so found ways to 'stretch' pre-existing legal concepts to make them applicable to the case - and in doing so created new, long-lasting case law. Would your expectation be that no new case law arises because legislation has everything covered with its structures and expressions? Perhaps you expect legislators to pass new 'patches' for each law as the short-comings of the existing implementation are exposed and recognised. Would anyone have the option of ignoring v1 of any new law and waiting until at least v2 was released? ;^)

Changing real world circumstances and conditions don't lend themselves to precise, structured analysis and exhaustive definition determined at a single point in time so attempts to legislate for them in such a manner strike me as using the wrong tool for the job. There are good reasons why so very many notations/languages have come into being and one of those reasons is because some are better-suited than others to expressing problems and solutions in specific domains - and "the law" isn't even readily characterised as a single domain. As someone once kinda said, if wishing to communicate about architecture we don't usually use the language of dance.

I suspect that specialists in law could point to many good reasons for 'fuzzy law'. There are certainly many terms used in legislation which are undefined and it is left open to the courts to interpret (or reinterpret) them according to what they hold to be reasonable and appropriate at the time.

Constraining the problem/solution spaces by considering each law (or even each field of law) as an independent entity is not a viable approach. The real world isn't like that and the 'fundamental interconnectedness of things' applies also to (apparently disparate) bodies of law.

If starting with, say, personal income tax laws and then extending to closely-connected stuff like CGT, IHT, taxation of corporate entities and ever onwards, I wonder how far one could get before connections between laws can no longer be accommodated by any amount of comprehensible tweaking of grammars or object-oriented structures or the like. The fundamental complexity can be concealed at some levels but will make its presence felt at others.

Cheers!

[stewamax]

To JonE’s point:

Precise definition sounds attractive at a first take but wouldn't there be a problem with the results being inflexible and potentially incomplete? One would have to recognise that the initial constraints may not be fixed forever

I agree. But my point was that the new generation of school-leavers would ideally be familiar with the unambiguous syntax developed for programming languages. There will still be uncertainty (and hence flexibility) about semantics. Having needed to wade through both primary legislation and complex contracts containing conditional clauses within conditional clauses within etc, and wondered under what set of circumstances some deeply nested statement applied, I have pined for clear unambiguous selection syntax. What may be clear from precedent and practice to lawyers is not necessarily clear to others.

The fact that such a statement “pink widgets are VAT exempt” may be ambiguous (what defines a widget? what Pantone shade of pink? etc) does not detract from the fact that the statement may apply under certain syntactically unambiguous conditions, even when the definition of each condition (“IF country = UK”) can leave room for further clarification or doubt (should it read “…UK OR Isle of Man OR Bailiwick of Guernsey OR Bailiwick of Jersey”?)