Legalese: (Was Run-on sentences)

[jkoney65]

Jkoney
---All: God save your majesty!


Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.


Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.


Cade:
Nay, that I mean to do.


Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78 

What a great idea.

> Ali:
> I don't understand.  If you're all right with a doctor using
> "legitimate technical terms," then why is it not all right for a
> lawyer to use them?  It's about precision.  Contracts/legal documents
> pertain to people's lives, and I firmly believe in precision of
> language when it concerns something important.

jkoney
As an accountant who specializes in retirement plans, I can assure you that lawyers are the least precise people you'll ever meet. 

They won't argue about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" but they will argue exactly what a pin is, what the head of a pin is, what constitutes dancing, what an angel is and how can it be proven, etc.

Precision in an understandable language would be much better than the way most contracts are written. 

>Ali 
>snip
> On top of that, trying to rewrite jargon into "plain English" would
> just result in something significantly longer, especially if you were
> unwilling to give up precision.  

jkoney
That is not true. You can be precise and explain things just as easily in "plain English" as you can in legalese. You wouldn't have to rewrite Carol's citation explaining each word, but write it so more common words are used in place of the technical terms. This is done all the time. The instructions you receive for your lawnmower/dishwasher/dryer/oven/stero/computer, etc. are written (at least the better ones) using terms that people understand. I have friends who are engineers and I can get them to tell me what something is in plain english. I would think that lawyers would be able to do that also.

jkoney (who needs to get back to work, but will try to get back here later on)