Ye flipping gods!<br /> <br /> Those are horrible. My take on why wording like that comes about is that we have long since removed law from being a comprehensible set of societal rules and instead turned it into a language for the law class (i.e. lawyers, law clerks, paralegals, politicians, judges and ilk).<br /> <br /> And as a matter of course, once something is written in legalese it cannot be unwritten, just countermanded or modified. To countermand or modify in the legal language seems to require a set wording.<br /> <br /> Now, I can read legalese reasonably competently... it is just not worth the migrane that comes later. I would rather read machine code.<br /> <br /> If you can't understand the legislation, why care? Our political system sows the seeds of voter apathy in this manner.

   

What I don't userstand is why they still use such outdated methods. We have tools that can easily show the changes between two versions of a word doc, or of a 10 million line computer program; why are our politicians still using prose to describe changes like this? <br /> <br /> Why not just say "as indicated in this picture"? Not only can regular people inderstand these things, but they wouldn't spend so much time writing 1000 words when a single picture could do...<br /> <br /> An example of the sorts of tools we ALREADY HAVE available:<br /> <a href="http://meld.sourceforge.net/meld_preview.png">Meld preview</a>.<br /> <br />

   

Of course, the Canadian system is not nearly so bad as it could be. In the US, for instance, they never actually modify the original text of the act/bill. Amendments are just listed at the top, and anyone reading the text has to manually check for changes each time, until such a point as the document is re-codified.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:5:./temp/~c109Kd2g3t:e129509:">Example</a>.