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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Legal documentation has its own conventions which I am not remotely qualified to advise upon. In the event of uncertainty in legal documentation, it seems prudent to consult someone with a background in law.
(Law is an area I'm both quite interested in and very ignorant about, but I've yet to find a good on-ramp for learning about how to practically interact with legal institutions and processes. It seems like legal texts should be extremely unambiguous, because they are produced by institutions who are presumably aware of the problem of linguistic ambiguity, and otherwise how are legal documents supposed to do their job? Then I remember that the same argument can be made of technical documentation, and people who product that for a living can do a spectacularly poor job of it. Other fields presumably also have people who are bad at their jobs.)
To be clear, I'm using the broadest definition of legalese, in this case: design guides, building codes. Technical material recognized by the authority having jurisdiction that is not intended to be ambiguous, it is just complex. Stuff where the advice is consult your engineer instead of consult your lawyer.
I find that often this sort of writing -- technical-ish, e.g. trying to describe a flowchart or a boolean circuit in casual text, as you see in law or documentation -- has various sorts of ambiguities (e.g. issues with associativity and quantifiers) that would be obvious if you tried to transcribe it into code.
OK. Gotcha.
If I understand the vocabulary of a text but the syntax is unclear, I'll assume it's badly written. If it's composed of pathologically malformed sentences, I'll assume my English skills are better than the author's. If the vocabulary is unusual, or it's a subject I'm unfamiliar with, I'll give more weight to my own ignorance being the problem.
That assumes that the linguistic ambiguity is bad for enough stakeholders.
A lobbyist who writes an amendment for a law doesn't always want that the politicians who vote on the amendment understand what it does.
An ambiguous version might also be a compromise that allows both sides of a conflict to avoid losing.