Re: intelligibilty and clarity of texts and communications...

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
SabDor@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

i'm interested in the above, especially in contexts of legal documents,
consumer protection, standard contracts etc.
i'm looking for research, line of thought etc., that argues that complexity
of and un-intelligibilty of "legalities" is redundant and un-necessary, and
serves political and corporational goals (keep the masses ignorant
about their rights/obligations). other possible connections would be
from information theory etc.
i have an intuition that the the intelligibilty and clarity of texts
could/should be measured and quantified
i will be thankful for any comment, reference etc.
Sabari G

There's a vast literature on legal language. You might start by looking
for work by Roger Shuy (Georgetown) and Judith Levi (Northwestern).

The "ordinary language" movement is hugely misguided, because the
precise meanings of the terms used in legal documents have been
established through usage over (for English) more than 6 centuries; when
you translate them into easy-to-understand words, you lose much of that
tradition and risk unintended consequences when it comes time to
interpret the document years or decades down the road.

Note that looking for arguments to support a particular point of view is
not "research."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

Thanks for the leads. I will look into them.

A personal comment: I find that legal terms never have "precise"
meanings. I think they greatly changed over the years of case law.

Also, the issue I'm trying to research only partly relates to the legal
terms per-se.

If you take a bank-customer deposit contract, for instance (as well as
all standard corporational contracts with their customers), the
document may include hundreds of words, complex sentences, conditioned
sections, definitions etc, most of which are rarely addressed.
The problem is that by legal fiction, we, cusotmers of these
corporations, are considered as we "agreed" to these documnets.
This is legal fiction, a very common legal tool. The problem is that it
is very remote from the reality of things (most people, including legal
professionals, never read those "agreements"), and causes many pratical
problems when issues get to courts.

What I'm trying to figure out, is whether the high level of complexity,
and low level of clarity, are actually necessary.
And yes, I already have an opinion. From my own experience (I'm a
practicing lawyer, in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv, for about 15 years), they
are not.

I'm interested in pursuing the academic aspects of this issue.

Thanks again

Doron Sabari

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