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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this points out a very general problem with the law: it generates a lot of boilerplate text. Lawyers don't really read it; they skim it for the relevant bits.

Obviously lawyers should not be cheating with AI, especially when they don't even check it. But it does sound to me as if this is an opportunity to re-factor the process. We're carrying forward some ideas originally implemented in Latin, and which can be dramatically simplified.

I'm not a lawyer; I know this only in passing. And I am aware that there are big differences between law and code. But every time I encounter the law, and hear about cases like this, what I see are vast oceans of text that can surely be made more rigorous. AI is not the problem; it's pointing out the opportunity.

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> problem with the law: it generates a lot of boilerplate text

I think the problem fundamentally is that matters of law require thorough, precise language, and unambiguous context. If you remove "the boilerplate" then you introduce a vast gray area left to interpretation.

Usually attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that will inform one perspective or another.

Legalese exists the way it is because it is an attempt to remove doubt. And even then, doubt still creeps in.

This is only the case when you care more about the letter of the law than the spirit of the law, which is, I suppose, most of the world. It doesn't have to be this way, it's a choice that society has made.

When I bought my house, in an alternate universe the paperwork could have been one sheet of paper that said "[My name] purchases home at [address] from [Seller's name] for [price]." and we'd all rely on our shared understanding of what it means to buy something and shared cultural expectations around home ownership and commerce. But our society did not make that choice, we don't live in that universe, so I had to sign a 300 page stack of papers 30 times.

law texts feel like a layering problem, like just decoration around decoration to avoid breaking existing 'code' without ever simplifying it

Okay so let’s try simplifying it.

We’ll change the existing murder legislation to “Killing someone is a crime”. It’ll save us thousands of pages.

But does that mean a soldier shooting an enemy is a crime? What about shooting someone who is raping you? What if you shoot someone by mistake, thinking they’re going to kill you? What if you hit them with a car? What if you fail to provide safety equipment which eventually results in their accidental death?

Oopsie woopsie, I guess we need to add another thousand pages of exceptions back to our simplistic laws. It turns out people didn’t just write them for the fun of it.

Those exceptions were accumulated over time rather than compiled into a coherent schema. I don't expect a finished product to be a single page, but neither does it require the literally millions that it currently takes up.

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