Yeah, there's loads of loopholes in something like "Don't do that or you will spend x time in jail".
Complications make loopholes and the more complicated you get the easier it is to lose sight of what your original intent was.
Should Canada adopt a 15YO law?
- Thread starter Machjo
- Start date
Complications make loopholes and the more complicated you get the easier it is to lose sight of what your original intent was.
I' m all for it.
The law should be clear and precise and readable in layman's terms ,not lawyer terms.
While we are at it basic law should be taught at school too. I find it aggravating that the law that is suppose to protect us cost us an arm and a leg !:angryfire:
The law should be clear and precise and readable in layman's terms ,not lawyer terms.
While we are at it basic law should be taught at school too. I find it aggravating that the law that is suppose to protect us cost us an arm and a leg !:angryfire:
Now that I can agree with. In a democracy, the law must be accessible to all. The bottom is, if you can't understand it, then you don't have to follow it.
Is that all you could read hen you were 15 years old? Just read Harry Potter, the Hobbit, etc. and you'll see that even in those books the vocabulary is quite vast. However, lawyers, need to put more effort in being concise and getting to the point without a person having to read an entire book to understand basic laws that apply to all.
There's actually a company teaching lawyers how to dump the illegible legalese. I'll get to that in a sec. But fiorst, I think 5P could benefit from reading David Mellinkoff's book, "Language of the Law". On the cover of the book is a little bio of the guy that says he was a, "brilliant, witty, and erudite UCLA School of Law professor, lawyer, and writer who was a faculty member from 1965 until his death in 1999. Known for launching the movement for simplicity and clarity in legal writing"
Anyway, about the company: LawProse.org, We're Changing the Way Lawyers Communicate
So it appears that there really is no necessity for a lot of the illegible legalese.
FP, you sly fox, I wanted to be the first to vote no. there was entirely too much sweetness and light going on here, and I wanted to be the first one to rain on the parade. Then you beat me to it. No fair.
Anyway, not a good idea, Machjo. When a legislation is drafted, they have to consider many hypothetical cases, have to imagine how legislation will impact in such cases. They also have to think, when should the law not apply, when that would be unfair to do so? Then they must think of how the society will be in five or ten years’ time (when you pass the law, you hope it will last indefinitely).
So there are many qualifications, exceptions, limits to anything that is being legislated. A 15 years old won’t be able to understand it in its entirerity (‘whereas’, notwithstanding, ‘nevertheless’, ‘pursuant of’ and so on).
Ordinary citizen usually is not able to understand that. If I read a legal document, I usually can make it out, but I really have to work at it to try to figure out what it really means. But that really is the job for lawyers and judges.
If we could write a clear, concise, unambiguous law in simple languages, there won’t be any need for lawyers, courts and judges. It will be at once clear if somebody has broken the law. But it doesn’t work that way, a law by necessity must be complex, to cover all the situation.
If we wrote a law in simple language, chances are it won’t survive the first court challenge. So no, laws must be written in complicated, comprehensive, legal language. Now, nobody really likes lawyers, but they are an unpleasant necessity of jurisprudence.
If the law is inferior, then some people who should not have been convicted will be found guilty, and some people who should be convicted will be found innocent. We can't have that. The law must be made as foolproof as possible.
If that is the case, we will have to throw away the entire legal jurisprudence (including the Charter) and start over again. Good luck with that.
Vocabulary may be vast, but the language is simple. In fiction, it is not imperative that you understand each and every word, each and every sentence. As long as you get the general gist of the plot, that is enough.
I can agree with you on some points, especially when it comes to criminal law. Things like tax laws though are another matter. Tax laws could be simplified a little.
Tax laws are just another ramification of criminal law. You have laws about murder, laws about theft, laws about arson and laws about taxes.
No doubt they could be simplified. But here again, the law must be made as fair as possible. Simple does not always mean fair, it also may be full of loopholes.
In fact, simplicity is the reason why some people support the flat tax.
In life I've found simplicity is pretty well invariably the best............it's when you get into the "ifs", "whens", "buts", "excepts" that you run into situations ready made for loopholes.
And what's wrong with a flat tax? If the issue is that some people are paid too little, then introduce co-determination legislation so that they can better bargain for fair wages. Also, it should be easy enough for the government to just exempt those below a certain income bracket. And for those with particularly low incomes, the government could always give them school vouchers to go back to school and upgrade their skills. So seeing that most of that money would go towards helping the poor anyway, what's the big deal?
And as I'd mentioned earlier, even fifteen year olds have a pretty advanced knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. If they can't understand it, then it's too complicated.
See here's the problem, you're looking at the legal language like you would any descriptive text. "Legalese" is more like a mathematical formula (in theory) where each word has very specific legal implications. Changing one tiny word can completely change the effect of the law and have branching effects on all other laws. Governments spend ages working on a single word because that word will mean the difference between x being legal or not (you can just imagine how much governments get away with and how much lobbying goes on over such seemingly insignificant details).
As for original intent, if law were to even come close to accurately representing original intent without being vague, each bloody statute would be like several hundred Encyclopedia Britannicas in length at the very least; each possible legal implication under every conceivable circumstance would have to be accounted for. In other words, beyond practical use.
Then there's the issue of how law is developed; it isn't an objective method, so that just makes the whole thing nonsense. All the technicality in the world doesn't change the fact that the original intent of the law is completely open to interpretation.
So in response to the 15yo law thing: firstly, why 15 and not some other age? Considering how backward neurology is, suggesting that we know at what age the average human brain can comprehend x is really just guessing). The present 18yo law is based on high-school education (i.e. it is assumed a person has sufficient education to understand law at that point) and to some degree on physical and mental development (i.e. the average point at which one has gone through puberty). Of course all this is highly dependent on circumstances; school standards vary, people learn differently, etc. so it's really just a ball-park figure that was settled on.
If you wanted something comprehensible, you'd need to start from scratch (at the constitutional level) and develop legislation via an objective or empirical approach, using logic systems to ensure a structure without anomalies where loopholes could form. And that's under ideal conditions, which you will not get.
Here's an alternative to the 15yo law: how about scrap the concept of crime and punishment as well as property, and treat the law as a guideline of how to behave like civilized human beings. Then technicalities don't mean much do they?
As for original intent, if law were to even come close to accurately representing original intent without being vague, each bloody statute would be like several hundred Encyclopedia Britannicas in length at the very least; each possible legal implication under every conceivable circumstance would have to be accounted for. In other words, beyond practical use.
Then there's the issue of how law is developed; it isn't an objective method, so that just makes the whole thing nonsense. All the technicality in the world doesn't change the fact that the original intent of the law is completely open to interpretation.
So in response to the 15yo law thing: firstly, why 15 and not some other age? Considering how backward neurology is, suggesting that we know at what age the average human brain can comprehend x is really just guessing). The present 18yo law is based on high-school education (i.e. it is assumed a person has sufficient education to understand law at that point) and to some degree on physical and mental development (i.e. the average point at which one has gone through puberty). Of course all this is highly dependent on circumstances; school standards vary, people learn differently, etc. so it's really just a ball-park figure that was settled on.
If you wanted something comprehensible, you'd need to start from scratch (at the constitutional level) and develop legislation via an objective or empirical approach, using logic systems to ensure a structure without anomalies where loopholes could form. And that's under ideal conditions, which you will not get.
Here's an alternative to the 15yo law: how about scrap the concept of crime and punishment as well as property, and treat the law as a guideline of how to behave like civilized human beings. Then technicalities don't mean much do they?
That would make it not a flat tax.
We could easily simplify our income tax system if we took away deductions for things.