alt Hacker NewsI strongly disagree on both points.
It's not "just English". There is a reason legal corpus is a separate thing. Just because a language uses the same grammar skeleton doesn't mean it is the same language.
If I were to train a model on all of written English excluding Legal Corpus and then ask it to interpret Legal corpus texts it'd be a disaster. The opposite is also true.
> The state does make this information available.
There was a 2nd part about it being comprehensible. That 2nd part goes hand in hand with my point above. More often than not legal texts are made to scare people away. Thankfully with LLMs we're seeing that changing rapidly. More and more people are able to educate themselves because the knowledge is no more gated behind a cryptic writing only select few can interpret.
And I am sure the next step is rewriting all of it into a human-friendly language.
I still see value in rigorous proceedings and there is value in a lawyer who can help you with strategic advice on legal. But that indeed is more of a plumbing work.
> More often than not legal texts are made to scare people away.
As a lawyer myself and someone who works with lawyers, I assure you that that's not true.
It's similar to engineering: When engineers write papers, commentary, or other works, they're communicating with practitioners who have shared context. It's still English, but you need the requisite context to make sense of it. It's not meant to be exclusive or to keep others out.