Law, Language, and Laziness in Action
The Usability Blog has this interesting post about software license agreements. The author of the post blames the outrageous complexity and incredible length of so many of these agreements on laziness:
Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.
The author of the post might want to consider another culprit — the typical legal writing class.
10 August 2007 at 21:23
I hadn’t thought of that. It makes sense, though. If the lawyers are *taught* to write like that, there’s really no motivation or reason to stop. Thanks for blogging about the article. I had a good time writing it and interacting with folks about it.