This is awesome. There are a lot of things I love about this country, but one thing we've done bad is create lawyers. Where I live (DC) 1 in 12 people are lawyers.
America inherited its legalistic nature from England. Uncoincidentally, the U.S. and England are two of the most successful societies in the history of the world. :)
Of course its difficult to separate correlation from causation on this subject. The best study I've seen on the matter (Magee, "The Optimum Number of Lawyers") doesn't try to detangle the correlation and the causation too much, though it does try to account for a number of other variables.
That said, its hard to ignore the track record of Anglo law. England was able to embrace a market economy earlier than its competitors in part due to its legalistic fixation on property rights. It had well developed legal structures suitable for bringing private money into the tasks of colonization and empire building. Its interesting to note that as China modernizes its economy, it is bringing over American legal experts to update its legal system.
Yes, legal frameworks that support things like property rights are important. The parent, however, was making a point about how the law has gotten overly complex over the decades, so much so that we now have an entire cadre of people whose sole job is to help others navigate that complexity.
It doesn't help that most legal documentation is written in bizarre, arcane language, as opposed to plain, spoken English.
It's not a straw man, because I'm not using "no law" and "no property rights" as the basis of comparison. Non-Anglo countries still had law and property rights. What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges. The complexity and sophistication of Anglo legal systems readily support the complex and sophisticated corporate, financial, and insurance transactions that underly modern economies. It's not a coincidence that the world's three largest financial centers, New York, London, and Hong Kong, are all common law jurisdictions based on English common law.
And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes?
>> What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges.
I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a ton of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad harvests in the manner you describe.
One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them run at acceptable performance. This becomes an issue when not every user can afford those resources: what you end up with is some people running the program at state-of-the-art hardware (i.e. rich people who can afford expensive legal representation), and others running it on decades-old hardware (i.e. public defenders). When these groups are pitted against each other (e.g. in a lawsuit), one group dominates, either by using the threat of litigation to force the other side to do something or by winning the trial.
Complexity in programs also cause other problems. For example, as a program gets more complex, it becomes harder to maintain and debug. If you write new code, you have to make sure it won't conflict with any of the old functionality. It becomes harder to test, harder to bring new people up to speed, and harder to train users because there's just so much the program can do. The problem is that, while you can refactor a program's code, you can't necessarily refactor the legal system: it just gets more and more complex, with no end in sight.
>>And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes?
Programs are written in programming languages because that's what computers understand. If you wrote the program in plain spoken English, it would not run. However, user documentation of the program is written in plain spoken English because that's what the user speaks. The phrase, "To create a new account, click the 'Register' button," does not require the user to hire a specialized, highly-paid professional who will interpret it for him.
The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is ultimately consumed by humans. Therefore it makes sense to write it in a language that most humans will understand. Right now though, it is written in the equivalent of a programming language, which is why we need lawyers to make it understandable. It really is ridiculous, if you think about it.
* or they made themselves important, but whatever, the problem is not their nominal work.