Friday, February 23, 2007

Long (Winded) Arms Of The Law

LinkedIn is a very popular and powerful web based tool/service which is basically "social-networking" meets "business networking" enabling professionals to share and grow their connections. I have met as well as reconnected with many wonderful new and old contacts there.

In trying to expand the level of services they offer, LinkedIn's owners have started a section called Answers, which is trying to copy a similar (but stupid) service offered by Yahoo! Yahoo's service is stupid and dangerous because people often ask serious and sometimes even medical questions and people wholly unqualified to answer (probably even people like me LOL) can respond with what could be wrong or dangerous information. LinkedIn is not likely to be dangerous like that.

I recently saw a question posted by a contact of mine, the very erudite and respected Irwin Kramer, of Legal Television.

It asked how LAW could be made more "user-friendly". I assume that means how it can become less drowsiness causing, painful, confusing and damn near indecipherable to people like you and me.

Tell me what you think of my (non-Legal) opinion:-

"Well, in my humble opinion, for starters, all else being equal, unless other circumstances require, not absolving writers of legal documents, laws, lawyers, judges, henceforth referred to as "writers", of responsibility for grammatical mistakes, including those made accidentally, or typogrpahically excepting electronically introduced errors, and not in any way undermining, or exceeding, any laws, statutes, procedure rules, or similar instruments of law, using, putting to use, enabling and enforcing, excepting use of force, sentences not to exceed 20 words, or 100 characters, or 2 commas....

MEANING, Make Lawyers Write English not HowCanIStretchThisParagraphIntoOneEnglishLatinCombiningSentence."