Comment by chromoblob

3 years ago

If you can't read documents in whatever form for their legal meaning, you can't work around the need for a lawyer. The DSL may be defined in comprehensible enough language and texts in it may be interpretable easily enough; but the method of contract is determined by agreement of its parties (inside the bounds set by law).

Currently, contracts are judged by their meaning in plain English, with any additional definitions being stipulated in the contract itself (either explicitly or as part of the verbal agreements that accompanied the negotiation of the contract).

A DSL is an extra layer of abstraction above that. If you agree to a contract written in some DSL, then you must also agree to the way that DSL translates into plain English. To significantly compress a legal contract that is not deliberately written to obfuscate its meaning, the DSL has to pack a lot of precise meanings into every term, making it very dense and hard to parse unless you're well-versed in it.