Re: Opening Up the Delphi Field Test

Jolyon Smith wrote:

It's not a side effect at all - it's a necessary device to protect the "legal profession" from being found out.

"The law" is an artifice of man. It should not need a "super man" to safely navigate a path through it. By ensuring that those paths are convoluted and confusing, the legal profession remain assured in their position as arbiters of "the law", and able to command massive financial reward for acting as guides for "lesser men" who would otherwise get lost in the mazes that the profession itself constructs. Often needlessly.

It is the worlds longest running confidence trick.

And have you ever noticed how it seems that to reach a position where you can influence the shaping of the law (i.e. government) you almost always have to be a _practitioner_ of the law to get there. Certainly individuals occasionally achieve positions of authority without that vested interest or experience, but once ensconced are virtually powerless to effect any change on the system itself, having ranged against them the institutions of power peopled by the professions they would seek to eject from those lofty positions.

Even in a democracy, turkey's don't often vote for Christmas.


That is a very cynical view of lawyers and the law. :-)

IANAL but I have come to believe that writing legalese is very much like programming. It is a effort to create a document with no ambiguity using a natural language. In order to avoid ambiguity they must very carefully phrase every clause. They have also developed standardized phrases and idioms (much like subroutines and design patterns) that are reused because they have proven to work as intended in the past. Just as programmers talk to each other using snippets of code that refer to system library routines they are all familiar with, but which would confound laymen, lawyers talk to each other using words and phrases they are familiar with that programmers often find confusing.

I think a lot of lawyers often find legalese burdensome as well, but unlike programmers, they can't switch to a new language which promises to make everything crystal clear to anyone every few years.

I do agree that the world would probably be a better place if lawyers weren't allowed to direct the creation of the law (i.e. enter politics), but were limited to implementing it. Again it's much the same in the world of programming. Things would generally be better if someone other than programmers designed the interface for most systems, and the programmers simply implemented what qualified UI designers came up with.

Dennis Cote
.

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