Admittedly, I didn’t research it deep enough to learn tarriffs were involved, it just struck me as kind of silly that the law would care whether tomatoes are classified as fruits or vegetables… then again, the way laws are written are patently absurd and I’m of the opiinion all laws should be rewritten in plain language so that comprehending the text of a law doesn’t require being a member of a highly gatekept priesthood.
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Short version: President Chester A. Arthur (one of those US presidents even Americans have never heard of) was dealing with all the problems caused by high tariffs, and tried to reduce them in a piecemeal way that Congress would approve of. The result was a mess of a law that became known as the Mongrel Tariff Act because it was a sort of Frankensteinian amalgam that made no overall sense.
One of its provisions exempted fruit imports from all tariffs. So John Nix & Co, importers of fine vegetables, immediately sued, saying their tomatoes should no longer be subject to the tariffs—with a substantial amount of money on the line! After all, a tomato is the part of the plant that contains the seeds, which makes it biologically a fruit.
Ten years later, after many long sessions of witnesses reading definitions from the dictionary, the Supreme Court ruled that when the law said “fruits” it meant it in a common-sense way, not in a botanical way, and thus a tomato is a vegetable and not a fruit.
It’s a fun example of how hard it can be to define things in an unambiguous way, and I’m going to use it in a lecture later this week, when students try to define “meaning”. What does it really mean for a word to mean something? (We will, of course, culminate by debating the definition of a sandwich.)
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Right - it’s a nice idea to say that laws should be written in plain language, and all things being equal clarity is usually better. But this is easier said than done - it’s an illuminating exercise to try to write, say, a loitering statute, and realize all the ambiguities and edge cases that immediately arise for something so relatively simple.
And meanwhile, plain language is often non-technical language, which makes it more approachable but also means that inconsistencies and inexactitude are more likely to creep in - like, have you ever been confused reading the Inform 7/10 docs and wished they would more clearly state exactly how things work? There are potential pedagogical advantages, of course, but when the downside risks aren’t “someone might need to post on the forums to get tech support,” but depriving people of liberty or life, or allowing billions of dollars in economic activity to proceed with settled expectations, some extra wonkiness to tighten up definitions doesn’t seem so bad.
And that’s just the “write the law quote-unquote clearly” part - now you need to run it through a legislative process where potentially a couple of hundred other people can weigh in and alter the language you’ve come up with if they think they’ve got a better idea.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad, unclear, and old laws that should be cleaned up, of course! But as in many areas, much of the low-hanging fruit was taken care of long ago, and there’s typically a reason that the tricky spots that still exist have stuck around (. And it’s notable that while there have been many, many attempts by would-be philosopher kings to standardize and rationalize all the laws, they almost invariably run into confusion in just a few years, while the common-law tradition has managed almost a thousand continuous years of development while supporting some of the freest, most prosperous societies ever to exist.
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I live in a civil law country, so I’m used to it. I far prefer civil law over common law, lol. No stare decisis, no “overturning precedent”, no legislating from the bench - the law is all written down in the civil code, and if you wanna change it, you elect a government that’ll change it.
I once tried to explain common law to my dad and I could barely do it, lol. Dad thought it sounded like the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.
For the last few days I’ve constantly been looking at page 27 of Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth to improve my grasp of body proportions. XD
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Were you going to use it before I made my joke, or has my joke helped determine course content?
-Wade
Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest I think common law is better than civil law or anything like that - there are definitely aspects of the civil law approach that make my blood run cold, but I’ve known enough folks from civil law jurisdictions who’ve shared similar opinions to yours to know that very much goes both ways!
But I don’t think the point I was making — the need to interpret ambiguous language and the balance between laying out general principles and technical specifications — depends much on the common vs civil law distinction; there are maybe some advantages on the civil law side from having a greater degree of organization and accessibility within the code (though at least in most jurisdictions in the US, virtually everything has been codified for close to a century), and possible disadvantages from instability of interpretation (though IME civil-law judges are often quite careful of precedent even if formally they’re not relying on it).
But yeah, this tangent is off topic so I’ll stop nerding out on legal systems 
I’m actually getting ready for a month-long trip so I’m figuring out what to pack to read; I need some long, compelling books to be space-efficient! Speaking of civil law, my wife got me a Napoleon biography last Christmas that’s supposed to be good so that’s a contender…
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Mike, beware that the sheer majority of book on Napoleon aren’t civil, but military !
(oh, perhaps is a case of beholder’s eye ?)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I just started reading James Clavell’s Shogun. It’s a travel edition, 1152 cigarettepaper-thin pages crammed from edge to edge with walls of tiny text.
Otherwise, staying with the “space-efficient” guiding principle, some other recommendations:
- The Court of the Lion by Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Altieri. (1086 pages)
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. (683 pages)
- Sarum by Edward Rutherford. (1344 pages)
- Neropolis by Hubert Monteilhet. (781 pages)
- The Terror by Dan Simmons. (936 pages)
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Your joke helped determine it—I’d actually never heard of that case before!
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That’s sort of like saying computer programs should be rewritten in plain language so that comprehending a program doesn’t require being a member of a highly technical priesthood.
The difference is that computer programs have to be extremely logical and self-consistent to work at all, while bad law is extremely easy to make and even the most rigorous law is subject to poor implementation. I blame flaws in the hardware.
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Yeah. It got wet.
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Alright! -karate punches and kicks air-
-Wade
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I confess to not understanding the distinction between common and civil law, and there are probably situations where it is genuinely advantageous to innumerate edge cases. Still, I get the impression most laws are written by lawyers for lawyers and are written to be as deliberately convoluted as possible so as to to make the common folk dependent on lawyers to have any chance at all to understand what the law actually says. At the very least, I refuse to beleave a single law that runs for hundreds or thousands of pages can’t be some combination of simplified, shortened, or broken up into more atomic units without losing something valuable in the process, and in the unlikely event I ever became president, one of the sanity checks I’d want to undergo before signing a bill would be to have a fifth grader read it aloud to me and veto anything they had trouble reading or which was too long for them to read without taking a break.
As for computer programming, at least there the verbosity is justified by computers being glorified calculators that have to be told the individual steps of just about any process, and there’s actually been quite a bit of advancement towards making languages more human friendly and letting programmers piggyback off existing infrastructure instead of everyone having to build their own metaphorical wheel from scratch. Heck, as niche as IF is as a genre, We have like half-a-dozen engines/languages/frameworks/whatever you want to call them specifically for writing IF, at least one of which has human readability sans a programming background as a major design goal… I also feel like programming is one of the least gatekept of the frequently perceived as high earning, high education, high prestige professions(just about anyone with enough dedication and the right aptitude can learn to program from material freely available on the Internet and publish small, personal projects that could actually be used in a portfolio an employer might take seriously and consider a suitable replacement for a CS degree, whereas Law is one of those fields you need to complete 4 years of undergrad near the top of your class just for the privilege of applying to Law School).
More on topic, Working through my Rosebush backlog, I read the article Behind the Bloody Wallpaper today.
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I finished When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. The premise is one day without warning the moon turns into a ball of cheese of the same mass. If you like Scalzi you will like this book.
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I just finished the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book by Matt Dinniman, and I was instantly hooked! It’s absolutely hilarious. I listened to the audiobook version, and the narrator made it even funnier. If you’re a fan of LitRPG, I highly recommend it!
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I am reading Journey to the West, a sixteenth century Chinese novel attributed to Wu Cheng’en. I’ve been obsessed with this story ever since watching Monkey, a Japanese TV adaptation, in the late 1970s. It follows the adventures of Tripitaka, a Tang monk, and his four disciples Sun Wukong (the Monkey King), Zhu Bajie (Pigsy), Sha Wujing (Sandy) and the White Dragon Horse as they travel to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures. On their journey they are beset by demons and all manner of temptations, but thanks to Sun Wukong’s fighting prowess and prodigious magical skills, they always win through. The TV show was full of humour as the bickering disciples vied for Tripitaka’s favour and I was pleased to discover that this was taken directly from the book. In places it is laugh-out-loud funny. The first translation I read was by Arthur Waley, which was excellent but drastically abridged. I’m now working my way through a more recent translation by Anthony C. Yu which includes all 100 chapters in four volumes.
There have been numerous adaptations of Journey to the West, including animated TV shows and a recent video game. Most of them take diabolical liberties with the text, but I can definitely recommend the Anthony C. Yu translation if you fancy a long read!
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Current audible book, “The Blazing World” a history of the 17th century English civil war, Oliver Cromwell, and aftermath. As an American, I find it cathartic.
In print I’m reading Harlan Coben “The Match”
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Thanks for your thoughts on the translations! I’m only familiar with Journey to the West through very abridged illustrated versions I read as a kid and snatches of various adaptations (the 80s Chinese TV show is a classic, and features visual effects that are hilarious to watch today), I really should read the full book.
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A high school friend had the book so I borrowed it. First glance, I was thinking ‘How can this thing that’s 2cm wide hold the truly awesome contents of Monkey?’ And they didn’t seem to. Maybe it was abridged. It didn’t do much for me, but I didn’t read the whole thing either, because it wasn’t doing much for me.
This was my experience of The Odyssey, which I read a few years ago. By the time I hit this original text (unabridged for sure!) I’d seen so many fantastic elaborations that it was a letdown. Scenes writ large in my brain across multiple films were often just from one or two paragraphs in Homer’s text.
I guess I shouldn’t hold the creation of films and TV against these thousands-of-years-ago authors of pre-novel stories that have lasted all that time 
-Wade
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Speaking of homer, can anyone recommend a good recitation of the Iliad or Odyssey backed by a good translation into English? Considering that these are surviving stories from an oral tradition written in a time and place where written copies would have been handcrafted objects and most would have enjoyed them via someone reciting them instead of reading them, it feels like that is the appropriate way to consume such stories. Just reading their text would be like reading a script of a play instead of attending a performance of the play.
Granted, being blind, I’m naturally inclined to prefer audio books.
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