Template:M intro design no-one reads this: Difference between revisions

Template:M intro design no-one reads this (view source)

Revision as of 17:37, 18 March 2024

256 bytes removed , 18 March

no edit summary

Amwelladmin

Bureaucrats, Interface administrators, Administrators

82,459

edits

@@ Line 32: / Line 32: @@
 To its principals, the contract preparation process is a sombre mystery. They are not ''meant'' to understand the actual words, and may cause themselves trouble if they try. It is better just to take generalised comfort that there are a ''lot'' of words, they seem legally sonorous, they are strung together in carefully constructed, if forbiddingly unbroken, slabs and the battalions of advisors who have gathered at the banquet on either side to pick them over will, by the time the busboys are serving coffee and warming up the disco, have {{strike|maximised their chargeables|made peace with the legal content}}.
-All that skirmishing and sniping must, after all, ''do'' something — ''mustnʼt it''? It must advance what the respective advisors take to be their clientsʼ best interests, however imperfectly they understand them?
+All that skirmishing and sniping must surely ''do'' something, no? Must it not advance what these agents take to be their clientsʼ best interests?
-In the same way that trenches and battle fronts thrust and counterthrust, the red lines in a negotiation move back and forth. Since the people who wrangle these textual monoliths are part of an educated elite, a kind of emergent wisdom settles upon the project. Its net effect — even if we cannot fathom how or why — will be a comforting conviction that everything will generally be ''okay''.
+In the same way that forward lines thrust and counterthrust, the trenches in a negotiation move back and forth. The wranglers of these textual monoliths are an educated elite, so an [[emergent]] wisdom settles upon the project whose net effect — even if we cannot fathom how or why — is the principals’ comforting conviction that everything will generally be ''okay''.
-But what if this assumption was — ''wrong''?
-To be clear, the question is not merely “do  commercial principals — should I say “[[agency problem|agents]]” — hire law firms to cover their own backsides?”
-Of ''course'' they do. Everyone knows that.
-It is more to say that the “attorney work product”, when you do read it, is dismal. ''It is not designed to be read''. ''No one reads a bond prospectus''.
 On this view, legal writing is designed to just occupy space. It is like that expanding polystyrene stuff they spray inside internal partition walls for soundproofing.
@@ Line 48: / Line 40: @@
 There is just no craft, no elegance, no design, no architectural panache, no basic economy. It is just this tortured, brutalised, monstrous torrent of dreck, from end to end.
-These people are meant to be wizards of language, after all. They should deliver the most beautiful, clear, elegant product.
+These people are wizards of language, after all. They could deliver beautiful, clear, elegant product. That they don’t is a kind of final triumph of form over substance.
-That they don’t is a kind of final triumph of form over substance.
+For that is the terrifying magnificence of the attorney work product: you can’t do without it: it is a kind of ticket to ride, but your enduring hope when you board the train is that you will not need to show it to anyone; that you can ride to your destination without an inspector.