Yes. When I worked for the Commonwealth we had implemented electronic medical record systems in the state psychiatric hospitals. Unfortunately persons in those hospitals were also frequently served by:
-State long term care psychiatric nursing homes
-Private psychiatric hospitals
-Quasi-Public residential group homes
-Essentially every hospital in the State, because when someone has an “incident” the police will take them to the nearest ER. They will then wait from 1 to 100 days to get back into one of the overbooked psychiatric hospitals.
-Thousands of private practice psychiatrists, counselors and etc
Since exactly zero of those other entities used EMR, there was great difficulty in reconciling records.
As someone in the real estate business I will say that I do not feel that laws are written intentionally to be vague and difficult to understand for the layman.
Firstly, what ralph1234c (or whatever) originally said were two risible things:
Courts are controlled by clerks who paid money to get their position
This is essentially false. In some places county clerks or whatever might be an elected position, so yes that person probably spent a sum of money to win election. However their election was based on the results of a vote, not them buying an office, at least anymore than any other politician “buys” an office.
The “regular” clerks who don’t have the fancy title and office are just civil servants and certainly did not buy their job.
The elected county clerks and what not also are probably not making vast money off of their position, and certainly would not be making money specifically out of prolonging a trial or etc.
Laws are written by lawyers so that only lawyers can understand them, and they use antiquated language.
Legal agreements aren’t the same thing as laws. Laws are statutes written by legislatures. Yes, the people drafting them are typically staffers many if not most of whom will have legal degrees. Many of the legislators themselves will have legal degrees. However a lot of them working in the legislature may not be materially involved in the practice of the law on a regular basis, so it’s questionable as to whether most people would consider them “lawyers.” (Obviously they are, technically.) But the people making money off of the legal system aren’t typically the same people who wrote the laws.
If you can’t read your state’s or locality’s statutes I think you have an English problem. Here is an excerpt from Virginia’s criminal code:
Do you really need the paraphrasing, “don’t burn shit or you get in trouble” to understand what that passage mean? Is it wordy, yes. Is it hard to understand? It shouldn’t be if you read at the level required to graduate High School.
Some contracts or legal agreements can be exceptionally convoluted and difficult to understand. Those aren’t laws, though. Those are legal agreements.
Further, even most contracts, while sometimes very wordy, are not difficult to *understand. *The reason my business has a close association with a law firm is because it doesn’t mean jack shit to me to just understand the wording, I need to understand deeper issues like “what is the wisdom of agreeing to this part of this agreement?” and things of that nature. There isn’t any way that wording the contract in a more “lay” friendly manner would help with that–it’s the legal wisdom and experience that is the real value add there, not the ability to parse legalese.
Courts are controlled by clerks who paid money to get their position
This is essentially false. In some places county clerks or whatever might be an elected position, so yes that person probably spent a sum of money to win election. However their election was based on the results of a vote, not them buying an office, at least anymore than any other politician “buys” an office.
The “regular” clerks who don’t have the fancy title and office are just civil servants and certainly did not buy their job.
The elected county clerks and what not also are probably not making vast money off of their position, and certainly would not be making money specifically out of prolonging a trial or etc.
I beg to differ ..Mr. Jackie Bulger (brother of “Whitey” and William Bulger) was the chief clerk magistrate of the South Boston municipal court. Previous to this, he had been employed as a fish cutter at the Boston Fish Pier.
AS clerk-magistrate, Bulger was in charge of scheduling all trials in the court-and was friends with many prominent lawyers.
As a fish cutter, Bulger never made more than $3.50/hour-after becoming clerk-magistrate, ne was able to affors a big house and a Cadillac sedan.
Coincidnec? yeah, sure it is!
Pay to get elected as court clerks. Then you cite a previously poor person being elected county clerk as evidence of your argument…how did he buy the office in the first place?
You’re rebutting my claim that court clerks do not get wealthy by creating a “complex legal process” and slowing down the operations of the court by noting that Bulger met many powerful lawyers and businessmen as court clerk. What that suggests is that through networking he became more successful, it doesn’t at all suggest he was being enriched by “deliberately slowing down the legal process.”
Actually as a builder I think we have too much in the way of standard prefab components, and too many design decisions based on those, rather than on unique site conditions or the needs of the occupants or just common sense. For example, I’ve worked on two large projects in which partition walls terminated on exterior walls in the middle of windows, for no reason except that the factory-cased windows had to be standard sizes, and the interior layout, based on blocks of standardized furnishings, was done without regard to where the windows would fall. In one of these cases, as a corollary effect, “luxury box” stadium seats ended up with the partitions between windows smack in front of them in some cases. None of the relevant decisions in these cases were mine, but I felt like a moron just to be associated with a project that yielded such patent stupidities.
ETA: I’m wondering what kind of “individuality” you see in cars.
Enforcement is not the issue we have been discussing, clarity is.
Off-topic.
Off-topic, and you are displaying signs of not understanding
what I wrote.
Why is exaggeration more likely to enter into a discussion of
legalese than a discussion of any other topic? And even if you
reject her testimony on the basis suspicion alone you still have
a problem with the affidavit, a problem whose reality has been
attested and expanded by a lawyer. You also have a problem
with this link I posted earlier:
Which as mentioned provides citation for the fact that the problem
has existed for over 100 years.
I have been playing the Internet debating game long enough to
recognize the category of poster neurotically unable to tolerate
not having the last word, and that means you. Now, you know what?
I am tired of you and your substandard posts, just tired. So go
ahead and say what you have to say while I look for other opponents.
Amen. But it does give them something to obsess about when they have no meaningful response so there’s that.
This notary thing is driving me crazy, because it’s hard to imagine how much worse the wording of that could possibly be… it’s like a test question for someone in an English class, and the test is to rearrange it into something intelligible, which is easily done without adding or subtracting a single word:
Making its actual construction even more confounding.
I think the comparison to the medical writing reveals the truth about all of this.
Our culture lumps together “doctors and lawyers” all the time, as though they are similarly skilled and specialized in two professions which are similarly complex. But of course, they aren’t. And who knows better how true that is than lawyers themselves, who, having actually received that education, recognize that the law is something that, for the most part, most intelligent, reasonably educated people could and should be able to comprehend if the need arose.
So while I don’t think it is a conspiracy, since that requires some kind of agreement among two or more people, I do think it is a kind of unconcious agreement among a large segment of the legal profession to persist in this simply to protect the story they work so hard to sell, which is that they are necessary for the success of anything more complex than an agreement to go to lunch. And of course, because they have spread their legalese cooties all over everything, at this point they ARE required in many cases.
[
Reading this is what prompted me to go back and look at the whole discussion. And just so you know, colonial, legal style books harp on clarity constantly.
In addition to what I just said, I think it’s bad lawyers that also cling to the legalese, because it’s all they’ve got. And I use bad in the sense of both not very skilled and/or not very ethical. Since they don’t have any particularly impressive talent, their ability to slog through legalese and create a bunch of their own is the only thing keeping them going as lawyers.
Truly talented lawyers don’t need that, and in fact it gets in the way of their impressive skills, which is why the really good lawyers tend to be the ones stumping for clarity.
This is definitely a fundamental good brought to us by lawyers, but it has nothing to do with complexity, legalese, lack of clarity. This is about being thorough, which can be done simply and clearly.
When your opponent has been the first to say “I’m done with you”, and done so by citing their belief that you need to have the last word no matter what, it pretty much does nothing but prove they were right when you respond at all, much less respond like this.
Well, thank you for not lumping me in among the alleged conspirators. I trust I will be able to to drop your name when my turn against the wall comes after the revolution starts.
Seriously, though, there’s just no such money making conspiracy. Look at your earlier quoted example - is she claiming that excess verbiage and confusing wording is designed to increase litigation and make lawyers money? Quite the contrary. She’s claiming that the confusing wording is a misguided attempt at decreasing litigation, or at the very least protecting the drafting party in the event of litigation.
Since this appears to be directed at me, I have to say that I’m afraid I don’t follow the point you’re making. Could you make it again with more underlining, capital letters, bolding, and larger fonts?
No it doesn’t. Like I said, you declare this at the top of the tabular environment. For vertical alignment you declare a new column type and use that. But that misses the point, because you shouldn’t be micromanaging tables in this fashion anyway. That’s a job for the journal typesetters.
There’s multiple GUI overlays for LaTeX now, including LyX which has been around donkey years. Further, again, I’m not seeing the problem with Excel export. By “formatting tricks” do you mean exporting to CSV with the delimiter set to ‘&’?
pdflatex is as fast as latex. Further, inverse search works with pdflatex and has for ages.
It’s actually not directed at you, pravnik - I was commenting about other threads in which other people’s comprehension skills seem to collapse in the presence of emphasis-by-fontstyle, many of whom then make the fontstyle the issue, vs. the content so emphasized.
Well, my apologies back to you for being unnecessarily snarky. Had a tough week at work that made me a little more on edge and a little snappier than I would usually be. Sorry, Stoid.
I will agree that the system is antiquated but I don’t think the solution is what you think it is (though, it is certainly a step in the right direction). What the kids need are shorter, more frequent breaks. So, no 2 month summer vacation but two and three week breaks more frequently. Most of the time, kids are in camps (read: daycare) for the summer so those would just have to be at different times during the year. It would help with retention and cause less burn out.
(Sorry to derail the thread that appears to be about legalese.)
I work in a state prison, as a records clerk. Every bit of information on an inmate is stored in their file. These files are as big as they need to be, and are sorted on shelves like a library. The medical techs have their own files, and some of what they do gets put into the central files as well.
It’s not just that every person interacting with the inmates needs these files. It’s not just that every little thing has to be documented on paper and placed into these files. It’s that so many people need these files at any given time that it’s quite often a guessing game figuring out who has what file and what piece of paper is missing/not filed yet. It’s a horrible, horrible fricking mess. I’ve worked in a couple of libraries, and there are ways to do things that make sense there, but don’t work here, as when the files are needed, they’re NEEDED, so the ‘check out process’ is sometimes just flat ignored. And heaven forbid if results from this or that aren’t in the file when someone wants it, because if that info isn’t in the file, then it doesn’t exist, and decisions are made based on that. And shit happens, creating more paper that needs to be put in just the right spot, EVERY SINGLE DAY.
It’s so frigging frustrating and insane.
We are supposed to be going digital with all of this, but the process has been in the works for years with no ETA on when it might actually get implemented. The process has been in beta, more or less, with another set of prisons for over a year now, and they still haven’t figured out how to make it work right. It’s seriously crazy and frustrating.
Last Monday I went to a local “IRS” office to ask about some payments they were supposed to send me but haven’t (they’re supposed to be “in e-space soon”); I took with me a “tax payment letter” (which they had sent me by mistake, is exclusively in Spanish and contains neither instructions for e-payment nor bank accounts, just “pay to: Navarrese IRS”) and, after explaining to the agent that for the last 10 years I’ve had about a 50:50 chance of being in the country on a given day, asked “do you think someone could go to, say, a bank in the UK with this and actually make payment?” He examined it, bit his lip trying to hide a smile and said “not likely…” “I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m weird, but just take a look at the ‘Navarrese abroad’ section of the local newspaper. Many of those people draw their salaries here, pay their taxes here, but only come home once or twice a year. Is there a form I can use to bring this up to the attention of whomever can update these?” He said he’d do it.
Amen. It would never have occurred to me that one of the obstacles to inter-EU mobility could be tax forms!
I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to go back behind the lanes of a bowling alley (friend works there) while folks were bowling.
I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting the Rube Goldberg-like contraption of giant rubber belts, metal ramps, gears, and spinning swirling pins flying around everywhere. I’ll never get irritated at pushing the reset button or asking for someone to clear my lane again - it’s a friggin’ miracle that those things work at all.
