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A comment on Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste. Parent comment

Re:Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumpi... by Retric on Sunday October 06, 2019 @04:05PM (#21174725)
I find laws to generally be very readable, the issue is case law is monkey patching the laws as written making all specific interpretations up for debate. At a minimum studying all the related Supreme Court cases is effectively required. Luckily there are only so many of those: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_States_Supre...

After that you’re still going to need to talk to a lawyer, but you should be able to keep up with what’s being said.

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Re:Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumpi... by internetman on Sunday October 06, 2019 @05:23PM (#21175251)
Note that China does not use Common law. Civil law is much more rule based; similarities in cases can not be used to explain each other. Having case XYZ the rule for XY may be disabled by a rule for Z (being defined in a completely different law book).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Ma...

EDIT: This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe.

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Re:Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumpi... by ginko on Monday October 07, 2019 @04:56AM (#21178750)
>This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe.

My guess is that Civil law simply doesn't need that much specialized tech since the law is clearly defined by the law books. The need to search tons of case law is mostly a result of the antiquated Common law system.

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Re:Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumpi... by dwohnitmok on Sunday October 06, 2019 @10:21PM (#21176780)
U.S. Supreme Court case opinions are also generally well-written, to the point that even people without a law degree can follow along, barring bits of jargon that usually aren't necessary to understand the overall meaning. For any news article summarizing a Supreme Court case, I generally recommend just reading the case itself.
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