Incomprehensible!
A Study of How Our Legal System Encourages Incomprehensibility, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do About It

Explains how the law often encourages actors to be incomprehensible in ways that actually undermine the purpose of the laws themselves.

Wendy Wagner (Author), Will Walker (Author)

9781107400887, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

356 pages, 17 b/w illus. 1 table
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.59 kg

'This is a valuable read for students, academics, and practitioners.' F. E. Knowles, Choice

The legal system is awash with excessive and incomprehensible information. Yet many of us assume that the unrelenting torrent of information pouring into various legal programs is both inevitable and unstoppable. We have become complacent; but it does not have to be this way. Incomprehensible! argues that surrendering to incomprehensibility is a bad mistake. Drawing together evidence from diverse fields such as consumer protection, financial regulation, patents, chemical control, and administrative and legislative processes, this book identifies a number of important legal programs that are built on the foundational assumption that 'more information is better'. Each of these legal processes have been designed in ways that ignore the imperative of meaningful communication. To rectify this systemic problem, the law must be re-designed to pay careful attention to the problem of incomprehensibility.

Acknowledgments
Part I. The Concept: 1. Introduction
2. Modeling comprehension asymmetries
3. The implications of comprehension asymmetries for the law
Part II. Application: 4. Comprehension asymmetries and consumer protection law
5A. Comprehension asymmetries in financial regulation
5B. Comprehension asymmetries in the law of patents
5C. Comprehension asymmetries in chemical regulation
6. Comprehension asymmetries in administrative process
7. Comprehension asymmetries in legislative processes
Part III. System-Wide Reform: 8. A blueprint for reform
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Politics & government [JP]