Anbiguous use of language repeatedly leads to lawsuits, such as O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy over an Oxford comma, or Pulsifer v. United States over logical operators.
Will any country conduct an official government project (commission, grant, any form counts) with a primary stated goal of looking for such issues in existing law and correcting them?
Not sure how to quantify "large-scale", maybe something like minimum 50 separate changes made?
Feel free to add countries
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@BrunoParga I meant to clarify those are just US examples, Polish law is also very poorly written, I have not seen other examples but I'd assume most countries let politicians write it
@CodeandSolder do you have examples of lawsuits over things like Oxford commas and logical operators in Polands or anywhere with civil law (not common law)?
Also, a broader question: do you want the law to be written by people other than elected officials?
@BrunoParga why would that not be the case? It is very easy to use AND when you mean OR, in Polish there are separate words for OR and XOR, but I had to check which is which as in common language they are used interchangeably. As for a case IV SA/Wa 1335/12 mirrors the linguistic aspect of Pulsifer nearly exactly.
And yes, I do. We don't, and shouldn't, require elected officials to be fluent in writing legal documents and creating well structured sentence logic, neither is that a good use of their time. It seems like an obvious idea to let them decide what the result should be and hire experts in the field to turn it into words.
Bonus meme:
Polish Constitutional Tribunal making a verdict on an accidentally inserted comma (PDF)
A 186 page book on punctuation in Polish law and how bad it is (PDF)
@CodeandSolder > It seems like an obvious idea to let them decide what the result should be and hire experts in the field
I do believe most of the actual text of laws is already written by specialized workers in legislative chambers, rather than by elected officials themselves.
As for the example, thank you for it; I still don't think this is a generalized issue in civil law countries, though I've updated on the case of Poland specifically.
I don't think that's accurate for a majority of countries, from what I was able to find in Poland the proposed text can be submitted bu a list of entities, it is deliberated and amended by politicians in the Parliament, approved by the Senate and signed by the president, with no professional rewrites at any point.
Council of Ministers has a body similar to one I'm proposing, but the majority of introduced legislation comes from elsewhere, and they only work on the initial version, I think.
From brief research US process seems very similar.
>As for the example, thank you for it; I still don't think this is a generalized issue in civil law countries, though I've updated on the case of Poland specifically.
How much Mana are you willing to bet against me being able to find a similar verdict in how many other countries?
@CodeandSolder
> the proposed text can be submitted by a list of entities, it is deliberated and amended by politicians in the Parliament, approved by the Senate and signed by the president, with no professional rewrites at any point.
The professionals act in these stages – drafting the text that will be proposed by someone entitled to do so and suggesting amendments to be championed by the actual legislators in the debate process.
> How much Mana are you willing to bet against me being able to find a similar verdict in how many other countries?
I propose the following: if you can show that at least 1/3 of the EU's non-common-law countries have at least 1% of the cases in a suitable high court hinge on the kind of grammatical issues we're discussing here (Oxford commas, logical operators, things like that), I'll pay you 100 mana, and you'll pay me 400 if you cannot find that to be the case (you seem really confident it is and I think 1% in 1/3 of countries is a very reasonable threshold).
To make things simpler to search, we should limit things to one court in each country, and to the years 2014-2023. We should focus on cases/courts that are mostly not about constitutionality issues but rather infraconstitutional legislation, since I get the impression this is more relevant to the matter – constitutions change much less often than lower laws.
I am open to negotiating these terms.
>The professionals act in these stages
Not necessarily, and looking at enacted law I have doubts they do it often.
>I propose the following: [...]
Those terms are completely absurd and I find it hard to believe you consider them otherwise.
Where does that 1% come from? You are completely moving the goalposts, your original claim was it does not happen.
Do you really expect me to analyze all higher court cases in 28 countries, 25 of them using a language I do not know, for a dollar? How would I even do that? Hire people? For a dollar?
Also, the time interval would effectively limit it to laws enacted in this decade, as earlier ones would have likely been adjudicated earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if all such cases make up <1% od the total.
It's OK to say "I was wrong".
@CodeandSolder your claim seems to be that this sort of lawsuit is relatively common ("Anbiguous use of language repeatedly leads to lawsuits"). My claim is that this is far from common; that you've generalized from two examples - Poland and America - to a bunch of countries where that doesn't apply.
What terms would be acceptable to you?
@BrunoParga I did not at any point claim that it's common in the totality of cases, just that it happens with some regularity, as it has to as things currently are. Additionally in situations that use precedent, while not requiring further complex lawsuits, it leads to a harmful situation where the information necessary to interpret the law is not contained in said law (and in situations that do not, Polish tax law for example, leads to unsolvable uncertainty), which is a general problem but here it has a reasonable solution.
@BrunoParga yes? there is an incredible amount of things for a lawsuit to be about and this one is limited to one per ambiguity at most at the higher court level