The Bank of England Act 1998 requires the Bank of England to “publish minutes of the [Monetary Policy Committee] meeting before the end of the period of 6 weeks beginning with the day of the meeting”.
It could have said “publish minutes of the meeting within 6 weeks of the day it took place”. Shorter, clearer and with the same meaning.
Does this sort of clunky verbosity matter? The answer is yes, because it quickly adds up, when sentence is piled on sentence, to hard to understand legislation that is the cause of mistakes, misunderstandings and argument.
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Legalese is as bad outside laws and regulations. I suppose it gives, to its practitioners, a degree of precision, at the cost of accessibility. Although some will see inaccessibility also as a bonus.
I have a theory brewing about the parallels between law and software; it would mean that law needs to be expressed in a higher-level language, and the corpus of law needs radical refactoring.
I disagree. That isn’t legalese, merely precision. The alternative wording is unclear as to which days are included in the six week period. The original version leaves no doubt.
The original doesn’t even say when the 6 week period begins, merely on what day. There is no necessity that a 6 week period must begin at midnight.
I daresay there is some legalese convention that settles the ambiguity, but this is the problem.
The high level language solution might use the text
“… within 6 weeks.” “within” would be a defined token, implicitly taking context from the event before, and defaulting to some obvious way of dealing with the exact endpoint. The (hyper)text of the law would use a mouseover or smarttag or some such to explain this, but most readers, looking for something important, can ignore it completely.
If we accept that a week is defined as seven days and that the use of the word day implies eevery minite of every day, then it is clear in the original that the relevant period is the period of 42 days starting on the day the meeting took place.
The wording “within 6 weeks” in the second case is ambiguous as to whether it refers to the same period or whether it also includes the 42nd day after the meeting took place.
Mark Williams says (I paraphrase), if we make a bunch of assumptions about the meaning, then the meaning is clear. The point about clarity is that assumptions are not necessary.
But, “6 weeks”? Why that long!?