[OT] Legalese [Was: Hackers and Painters and Lawyers]

[P T Withington <address@hidden>]

On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 14:42 US/Eastern, Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. 
wrote:

>> On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 09:47 US/Eastern, Peter J. Wasilko, Esq.
>> wrote:
>>
>>>     All in all, legal drafting looks a lot like software reuse.
>>
>> Unfortunately, via cut and paste, rather than standard libraries.
>
> Actually, Bar Associations set up committees to pool their members' 
> legal boilerplate and compile  libraries of association endorsed legal 
> forms in the file formats used by the most popular expert system 
> document assembly shells. Some of these distributions even include 
> assembly rules. So there is more large-scale sharing at work than you 
> would get with cut and paste alone.

What I meant was, that when I get a contract to sign, it is 50 pages of 
material that is probably 90% the same as the last contract I signed, 
but I am expected to read the 50 pages and see if something is amiss.  
Too bad I can't get something more like:

#include standard-contract

define clause based on standard-something
   override "blah blah" with "woof woof"

etc.