[rayiner]

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?

[enraged_camel]

>> 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.

[rayiner]

> 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.

Anglo legal systems aren't more sophisticated merely because they've been in development longer. It's that English society was legalistic and willing to readily embrace legal abstractions. Think of the conceptual leap from a traditional right to property (i.e. the legal system will keep someone from taking my land by force), to the Anglo notion of property (nearly any set of rights and obligations between parties can be wrapped into a contract that can be held and traded like property). The latter concept is tremendously enabling of markets, but it's not obvious. It was invented by a society that was totally comfortable thinking in legal abstractions, and that proved to be a competitive advantage.

> 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.

Let's analogize the legal system to a computer operating system. My phone runs Kit Kat, whose big feature is that it can "comfortably" support phones with as little as 512 MB of RAM. This is almost 10x as much RAM as I had in my high-end desktop computer some years ago (PII-era), which ran NT 4.0 just fine. Operating systems get slower and more complex every year, but nobody seems to really see that as enough of a reason to forgo the benefits of the complexity. Nobody cares about absolute overhead, but relative overhead. In the U.S., the legal sector's share of GDP has been steadily declining since the 1970's.

> The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is ultimately consumed by humans.

Legal documents are much more like formal design specifications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification) than user documentation. Legal documents are references against which disputes can be resolved. Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute about, say, whether a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the specification.

[enraged_camel]

>> Nobody cares about absolute overhead, but relative overhead. In the U.S., the legal sector's share of GDP has been steadily declining since the 1970's.

Yes, but you shouldn't look at relative overhead in terms of the legal sector's share of the GDP, because that doesn't tell you the whole story. What you need to look at is relative overhead in terms of the average person's ability to afford legal services. Essentially, it comes down to this: if people are able to use the threat of litigation to bully others because they know that lawsuits would be too expensive for those others, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

>>Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute about, say, whether a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the specification.

I'd say that if users cannot use the feature because they don't understand it, it doesn't matter whether it was implemented properly: it's a failed feature.

Essentially what we are asking people is to abide by the law, but making the law too complicated to understand by the average person. Do you honestly not see the problem with that? I read somewhere that everyone is a criminal because we just have too many laws and people break them all the time without realizing it.