pravnik, nobody is arguing that lawyers and those involved in law can’t use terms of art or “jargon”. Every profession uses them to some extent.
The problem is that in law far too many of those terms appear unexplained in material designed for laymen. If I planned to send you a letter about fundraising, I wouldn’t expect to throw in terms like LYBUNT or CFA or PG Calc expectation and expect you to know what those meant, though if I was writing to tygre who’s also a fundraiser I’d feel comfortable using them. And it would be insulting to you, as someone outside of my industry, to use those terms when you had little way of knowing what they meant. Likewise, if you were writing to another lawyer–certainly, use terms of art. But just as you’d expect me to write out “someone who gave last year, but not this year”, “what campaign, fund purpose, and type of appeal”, and “what is the present value of this planned gift as determined by PG Calc” when I was writing to you, don’t I have the same expectation that what you write to me is in clear English?
I should add, as an aside, that legal groups in Europe are starting to see the logic in the above, and there is a “plain English” campaign in the legal community in the UK. I haven’t heard of anything similar in the US or Canada.
You’re talking about bad drafting and abuse of jargon when making a personal communication with a non-lawyer in a non-technical communication, which has nothing whatsoever to do with ralph124c’s bald assertion that the law itself is intentionally fashioned in such a way so as to make it intentionally confusing and inaccessible to a non-lawyer for no other purpose than to perpetuate business for lawyers by some sort of secret agreement. The former is regrettably bad lawyering and bad drafting; the latter is a ridiculous conspiracy theory, and, to use a term of art, total bullshit.
Before I take a looksie at your 5-6 year-old posts can you tell me if they
addressed these concerns voiced 6 years and 7+ months ago by Cynthia Glassman,
then Chair of the SEC?:
(From link, emphasis added):
Speaking of business computing many of you have surely seen the employer
to employee PC user caveat “Users can have no expectation of privacy”
(40 keystrokes). Only a lawyer or a pedant could sign off on that, and prefer
it to the simpler “Users cannot expect privacy” (26 keystrokes).
I think at this point we’re in agreement that language should advance a topic of conversation rather than act as an impediment to it. Accordingly, before I can respond, you’re going to have to very clearly and simply tell me exactly what the hell you’re talking about, because despite admirable attempts at highlighting on your part I simply have absolutely no idea.
That is a ridiculous objection, and I think you know it, but here are
the same six paragraphs unhighlighted:
BEGIN QUOTATION
(a) problem is that the securities laws, which share as their underlying goal the disclosure of material information upon which the investing public may make informed decisions, are sometimes written in dense legalese. The complex language in these statutes is in turn incorporated into many of the Commission’s rules and regulations, which are then mirrored in the marketplace disclosures. As a nonlawyer - I am an economist - I have a real problem with that. I don’t speak legalese and neither do most investors.
Based on numerous discussions I have had on this subject since becoming a Commissioner, it is clear that there is a difference in goals of the disclosing parties and the recipients of those disclosures. Very simply put, it is my perception that disclosing parties and their lawyers - be they mutual funds, broker-dealers, investment advisers, or operating companies - view their disclosure obligations with an eye toward limiting their potential liability. Thus, the disclosures that they make, while often voluminous, do not necessarily provide information in a helpful, informative manner. In contrast, the recipients want timely, complete, and useful information that is readily understandable.
In my view, limiting the liability of the entity making disclosure is the wrong emphasis. Instead, the focus of disclosure should be to enlighten investors.
… I reviewed some current disclosures by reporting companies. What I thought I would do is read you the disclosure, and then translate it into English. Although I paraphrase rather than quote the actual disclosure, I assure you that I am not making up the gist of these disclosures.
(1) Disclosure Number One Regarding a Mutual Fund: No salesperson, dealer or any other person has been authorized to give any information or to make any representations, other than those contained herein, in connection with the offer contained herein and, if given or made, such other information or representations must not be relied on as having been authorized by the fund, the fund’s investment adviser or the fund’s distributor.
(2) Translation: You should rely only on the information contained in this document. We have not authorized anyone to provide you with different information. END QUOTATION
Although longer than the usual SDMB submission the quotaion above
should really pose no problem for an educated reader, so I do hope you
will give it another try, and not succumb to any temptation to dodge
the issue of the pervasive legal jargon which subtracts so much value
from so many enterpises.
Again, I’m not sure what point you’re making (and I apologize if my post above was a little too much on the sarcastic side). Are you trying to say that bad drafting is common? Absolutely nobody would argue with that - that’s the entire point of plain language theory in drafting. The point being argued isn’t whether or not legal writing often includes bad drafting, it’s whether bad drafting is part of some secret conspiracy theory to make lawyers money. It’s not. It’s just bad drafting.
Nor was I positing some conspiracy theory. But it seems you’re saying the very “terms of art” which are perfectly acceptable in lawyer-to-lawyer communication are, when used in works written for laymen, can be handwaved away as “bad drafting.”
I wrote a doctoral dissertation at Oxford in Tudor church history. When I can understand ecclesiastical legal documents from 16th century England (and half of those were written in Latin!) clear as day, but can’t understand a “simple” real estate legal document because of impenetrable writing, that’s a problem. It seems to me that “bad drafting” is the rule, not the exception, and it’s something that needs to change in the legal community.
I will take your word for it that you are not a conspirator. That does
not rule out conspiracy as a motivating impulse in the behavior of a
substantial fraction of our already grotesquely bloated legal profession.
What I guess you refer to as the “plain language theory” has been in
the works publicity-wise since at least the mid 1970s: more than 35 years,
and about 30 years before the SEC Chair tried to make a public issue
out of it in 2006. If the legal profession was really serious the change
over could have been complete by the turn of the century. Lack of progress
certainly suggests powerful resistance within the profession, although
few if any lawyers are going to come right out and say that they are
holding up reform on purpose. I do not think it is out of line to consider
such behavior to be conspiratorial.
I am the only person on this board who paid full attention to every single post in every single thread about my legal issues: the fact is that I was indeed told that as a non-professional I was not capable, from the very first thread (2007, before the trial) to the last, many times, many ways, by many people, legal experts and non.
My making this point is not in any way an invitation to reopen my legal issues for public discussion and dissection across the board. But Big T made an excellent and valid point, and a true one, and it is incorrect to dismiss it with this untrue statement.
Horizontally, everything gets centered by the column descriptor. NOT vertically, which was my problem. Really tables for me was a nightmare. Another problem that I had was trying to put numbers into tables that were is scientific notation, or had bolding in them, or whatever. There as well as the problem of getting the numbers out from Excel you had to do special formatting tricks to get the right numbers that you wanted. I think that without an interface to tables (and there were none around when I was working with it) it is simply unusable for anything remotely complex. You spend ridiculous amounts of time laying out tables that in any other word-processing situation is done in a few clicks.
Secondly, at least when I was using it, pdflatex was not a good option. DVI output (which requires EPS) was far better. First, with DVI you could do inverse searches, which made fixing problems easier. Secondly for large documents pdflatex took ages to compile, which was annoying for just making small changes. It is a huge drain on productivity to have to wait a minute or two to see what the your document actually looks like, especially when you are laying things out.
The name of the person who acknowledged signing the attached document (i.e. the “within instrument”), and whose signature you (as a notary) have verified:
"On the 30th day of June in the year 2011 before me, the undersigned, personally appeared John Smith… "
This wording is typical of a notarial certificate.
