Also, legal texts are the always longer than a conceptual tl;dr of them. Covering for all eventualities. It's not a flaw of the legislation itself that some boilerplate is required. Also, a lot of it is contextually relevant (e.g. there's entire sections for regulating specific industries).
Your average contract contains the same boilerplate by percentage.
Yikes that is one hell of an over interpretation. These short sentences instead of huge legal speak sound good on paper but things like this make it clear why every law nowadays is hundreds of pages minimum.
If the contract is long but most of it are examples, explanations of terms, and references to where and how things are defined then length would not be a problem.
Fair; but my point is more-so, if there was a Page 27 at the end that inserted some unusual terms, it'd be really obvious because it wouldn't look like all the templated stuff before it, and anyone reasonable would catch it. Its also a lot less tiring to read through those preceding 26 pages because its all templated, and you're really just reading the custom notes and checkboxes and such.
I don't feel its unreasonable to read through a dozen or two pages of contracts for something like a rental lease that will eat up 30% of your income for the next year; and I've never felt that my city/state is in dire need of improving the situation. The problem with online service terms is more-so that: they aren't standardized, they all say different things, they oftentimes claim things that aren't legally enforceable, they're usually a UI afterthought... they're just bad. We do need some kind of legislation for those. I don't feel that requiring a summary is the answer.
You're assuming that because a contract is simple you're more likely to understand it correctly. That is horribly misguided.
In all likelihood you don't fully understand contracts regardless of length because you're unaware of the entire legal environment they exist in. The reason contracts often have weird stilted phrases is that they have specific meanings established over decades if not centuries of legal battles over those semantics.
A good example for doing this right are the Creative Commons licenses: they come with a summary in plain English for humans and a full license text for the legal system.
There are historical reasons for these provisions though.
Take, for example, the standard UK limitation of liability cut-and-paste block. (About half a page.)
It's that long because there is case history on each point suggesting that if you don't enumerate each of those the conditions separately then you may get nailed for it. And every time there's a new test case that isn't quite covered, the list gets longer.
The only way to correct that kind of mess is through legislation. And there are so many examples of that kind of crufty-for-a-good-reason language that the patchwork would take years to unravel and have many unexpected consequences (not to mention lots of uncertainty until five hundred years of new case law was established).
There are people working on this kind of thing (for example the new companies act, which makes incorporation documents much simpler and removes some of the 'peppercorn and two groats must be thrice weekly burned over a blue flame' anachronisms) but it takes time.
Definitely agree with your approach to drafting, but I think you could be overreacting a bit here. Even the shortest contracts might seem like a "wall of text" to the lay person, and short paragraphs stringed together is a wall of text.
At any rate the preferred format in most legal contexts is still "`wall' of text" (whether big or small wall, as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations), which is what I think was the original point.
I might be naive but I was expecting that someone would read it and catch things like this. It's a trade deal, not a high school homework.
If it's too long to be read, then are all those details really necessary?
It just like contracts, most privacy policies, etc that are written in gibberish, are extremely verbose, yet everyone is afraid to simplify it because "there must be a reason why legal documents are not written in plain English". Sometimes there is no good reason.
Anyone who's written long contracts know you start with some boilerplate that contains a bunch of stuff and gradually whittle it down till it's just what you need.
The error they made was assuming people would understand that process.
If you think you need a 44 page document to protect yourself that, realistically, mostly only lawyers would ever read in full that's understandable: most of the big companies do it.
What I don't understand is why they felt they needed to be disingenuous about it: 44 pages of legalese isn't "keeping it real" or "trying to keep things simple" for most reasonable connotations of those phrases. It appears there isn't even a diff to compare the old terms to the new terms, either.
I really wish more lawyers would think this way. Every bill passed in Congress nowadays is hundreds or even thousands of pages long, and filled with incomprehensible legal language.
It's as if the text itself is intended to obscure the meaning, rather than explain it.
You'll notice they explicitly don't cover regulations (like the one they were writing), probably because of the amount of legal precedent for nitpicking the exact phraseology of a given law or regulation...
Ah this is another case of people not reading long legal contracts that they sign. I would have been surprised if this wasn't standard in the EU as well as Asia
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Another great on is that text size has legal meaning here. The larger/darker the text the greater the legal weight. So if the contract says two contradictory things, the larger text wins out...
This is brilliant. It's always seemed crazy to me that terms, laws, and especially contracts are written in legalese that only a trained lawyer could really understand, and yet all lay-people are expected to adhere to the nuances of these rules.
Obviously that simplicity isn't sufficient alone, or we'd just have one law "Be Good" (even that needs 'good' to be defined properly) -- but having a summary like this next to the specific details, in "lay-galese" if you will, it seems like this should be the standard way to write all legal documents.
I hope it doesn't open them up to liability due to the interpretations of the summary, though?
Also, legal texts are the always longer than a conceptual tl;dr of them. Covering for all eventualities. It's not a flaw of the legislation itself that some boilerplate is required. Also, a lot of it is contextually relevant (e.g. there's entire sections for regulating specific industries).
Your average contract contains the same boilerplate by percentage.
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