Law Documents in a Nutshell

Ramakrishnan M writes "LawMeme has a two part article (more to come) on reading and interpreting Legalese for geeks, titled "Law School in a nutshell". Here is the Part 1 and part 2"

Comments

Do you really want to learn how to deal with law?

[Anonymous Coward]

This website has a bigger reference. Enjoy.

What's the definition of "is?"

[rice_burners_suck]

Law documents suck. Why does everything need to be written in such a stupid way? For example, why does something need to read, "...blah blah blah any person, including but not limited to parents, spouse, children, blah blah blah or any other person." Why the "or any other person?" We've already said, "ANY PERSON," that means ANY person, right? No wonder any legalese document is such a page-turner.

This bothers me not because it looks and reads dumb, but for another reason: All those jackasses out there who write this legalese write it as if the legal documents need to handle every possible detail, including but not limited to details that are already handled by the document because it CLEARLY STATES that those details have been handled. Instead of saying, "This Agreement states that Client will not bitch and moan for any reason," and counting on the word "any" to mean what it says, legalese documents say, "Client will not bitch and moan for any reason, including but not limited to lack of support, unreliability, failure to deliver, failure to meet Client's expectations, failure to do this and failure to do that, or any other reason or legal theory." Well, if the word ANY doesn't mean ANY the first time, what makes it mean ANY the second time? In other words, if "for any reason" is not enough because it opens holes in the argument, then what good does the ANY OTHER REASON do at the end? It's like writing, "if (this) then { that; } else { ; }" There's nothing in that "else" because if we've established that ANY doesn't mean ANY, ANY doesn't mean jack. Which brings me to my next point. There are probably 10001 reasons to bitch and moan that are not listed in the "such as but not limited to" section. If ANY doesn't mean jack, then what good is it to list all those examples when a million others aren't listed? What, are you going to list every word in the dictionary in every possible order and combination just to be sure? What am I trying to say? Legalese is STUPID, and it's gotten that way because assholes kept using loopholes like that to their advantage, to screw someone over, and the courts failed to use common sense, thus letting the system degenerate into a piece of shit where a document governing the sale of cabbage must be 14,000 pages long.