Autistic woman banned from having sex in latest Court of Protection case
This reminded me of previous LW comments about how we restrict the rights of children for their own good.
On the one hand, children can't understand the risks so we stop them having sex.
But on the other hand, animals can't understand the risks and we happily let them continue having sex.
When I read your original comment, I took you to be criticizing the judge, not the legal jargon. My point was that any unfortunate implications from the judge's statement were a product of the disconnect between legal jargon and ordinary usage. I don't understand your distinction between "misleading" and "opaque," by I agree that lots of legal jargon does not coincide with ordinary usage of the words. For example, "probable cause" can be satisfied by beliefs that everyone agrees are less than 50% certain.
If your criticism was directed at the lack of clarity of the legal jargon, then I don't think we disagree. Intelligent lawyers are aware of this disconnect, but for transaction cost reasons, legal jargon is seldom changed to improve clarity for the lay audience. As I said above, I don't claim this is optimal. But that is a point about technical jargon, not about law.
Again, I want to make it clear that my criticism is specific to this particular instance, and does not generalize to a criticism of technical jargon in general.
The distinction between "misleading" and "opaque" is as follows: a term T is opaque to a person P if P is unable to arrive at a hypothesis about the meaning of T merely from the form or structure of T itself. Roughly speaking, the person doesn't understand the term, and knows they don't understand it. Habeas corpus would be an example of this: even if one understands Latin (no do... (read more)