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Regulating Plain Language
No full textWhat one scholar coined a “quiet revolution” in consumer contracts has been a half century in the making. And the revolution extends well beyond consumer contracts. Legislatures and regulators passed over seven hundred plain language laws infusing plain language into consumer contracts, notices, disclosures, government reports, court forms, election ballots, and more. They did so with one goal in mind: make legal documents more understandable. This shared goal crosses doctrines and pierces the traditional private law-public law divide. Yet despite sharing a goal, lawmakers differ dramatically on how to achieve it. The result is a bizarre patchwork of constitutions, statutes, and regulations with massive variations. By examining these variations, this Article takes on the previously overlooked normative implications of plain language law design. Lawmakers must decide which documents to cover, what standard to apply, and what enforcement and penalties to allow, which necessarily involves classic policy-infused decisions like choosing between the free market or regulation, allocating burdens and costs, and line drawing. As a result, the Article contends the traditional view that document design is a lawyer skillset reducible to convenient lists of “best practices” is wrong. Lawmakers have replaced lawyer discretion. Their involvement, and the scale and complexity of their design choices, have converted plain language into a legal doctrine driven by quintessential public policies. More, the complexity of plain language laws extends beyond how to design the laws to the more fundamental question of who designs them. The complex patchwork of codified laws from legislatures and regulators sit alongside expansive common law plain language requirements unilaterally injected by courts. Predictably, with so many decisions made by different decisionmakers, discrepancies galore pervade the national landscape. Such discrepancies create separations of powers tension and inefficiencies as drafters struggle to find and comply with so many different requirements from different lawmakers. The Article argues for an expansion of plain language common law because courts are best equipped to create such a standard. It turns out plain language laws are anything but plain
Student Life E-Newsletter October 23, 2023
Get PDFhttps://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/studentlife/1139/thumbnail.jp
Student Life E-Newsletter January 23, 2023
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Session 1b: Innovation in Legal Contracts and Deals - How Lexion is Incorporating AI into Document Revision
Get PDFHere, Gaurav Oberoi (CEO and Founder, Lexion) & Jessica Nguyen (Chief Legal Officer, Lexion) discuss Lexion and how it will change the legal industry. Lexion seeks to revolutionize how companies manage the contracts that they use. It has begun to corner a particular market in the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), helping in-house attorneys to improve their workflow by automatically analyzing documents. By using AI, the program can successfully remove what the CEO of Lexion refers to as “low value” work. This allows overworked in-house attorneys to not only do more work in a faster time frame, but to also focus on big picture legal matters for the company without spending as much time on the minutiae. But how will this impact the legal profession, and more broadly, the corporate world? Will lawyers and other positions be replaced by this technology? Or simply enabled by it? While the future may be uncertain, current limitations of programs that utilize AI require that, ultimately, a human must review the program’s output