Crowdsourced law: terminology
Law has always been a crowdsourced experience. I’m thinking about the law of contracts in Europe, before the codification age began (early XIX century), for instance. Contract law was developed by people bargaining among them and building legal solutions to fit their business needs. Law has always been crowdsourced. Then, gradually, the State walked in. The first way to alienate the law from the people was using a complicated language: I’m not saying it was intentional. But it gradually happened. State enacted laws which were not understandable by normal people. (By the way, it happened long before the codification age. But the codification age was a definitive step into locking the law into the books).
Ok, well, recently I heard of some legal projects which have to do with crowdsourcing of legal terminology, in many different ways. That is, they deal with people’ understanding of legal language, use of non legal terms for building legal terminology, rewriting of legal terms by people..you name it. I’ll list them here.
Let’s start by this project by Cornell LII, Michael Curtotti and Eric McCreath, How do you read me, to test readability of legal text. So clearly the hypothesis to test and measure is that legal text is not clear for normal people (non lawyers), which, on the other hand, are the very subjects of every legal text.
The Fuzzy Law project by Cardiff University, aka an online collection of lay citizens’ understanding of legal concepts. Lay citizens = normal people.
Not very rigourous, but our project What’s on a Lawyer’s mind is worth a mention too. How do normal people order legal terms in categories?
This project by Amy Taylor, Building a Legal Ontology, partly deals with crowdsourcing because, well yes, she’s building an ontology (a top down thing), but she’s also using Fastcase search results to build up the legal terminology. That is, using what people looked for to create the legal vocabulary.
The Legal Design Jam where normal people are asked to rewrite and give a massive make over of a legal text to make it understandable by its very target: again, normal people.
This paper by Robert Richards and John Gastil Legislation by amateurs, is about ballot initiatives and citizens’ understanding of legal terminology. In the words of the authors “Plain legal language research suggests that citizens’ understanding of legal information increases to the extent that the communication of such information accords with citizens’ own legal communicative practices. Yet we know little about such practices. The goal of this study is to increase our understanding of those practices”.
DoAgree will be a crowdsourced template service, to include ” whatever terminology author wants”, so also plain language. Curious to know how it goes.
If you happen to hear about other stuff, let me know!
