As a part of our upcoming Plain Language Law project, we’ve been experimenting with, tweaking, and in some cases trying to “break” our Plain Language Service API to make sure it’s up to the task of taking the laws and legislation of Aotearoa New Zealand and making them more accessible.

As an example, we can take Part 3, Provision 22 of Fencing Act 1978, titled “Where fence to be built”:

Save as otherwise agreed or ordered by the court, the middle of a fence shall be upon the boundary line:

provided that, where a fence is supported by or formed about posts, the posts shall be placed on the boundary line or as near thereto as practicable.

Running it through our refined base prompt tends to generate something like this, which has a goal of generating plain-language targeted at someone like a primary school student:

When you build a fence, you should put the middle of it right on the boundary line between your property and your neighbour’s property. This is what you should do unless you and your neighbour agree to something different, or if a court tells you to do it another way.

If your fence has posts that hold it up or if the fence is built around posts, you should try to put those posts exactly on the boundary line. If that’s not possible, you should put the posts as close to the boundary line as you can.

We’ve found this to be a level that doesn’t over-simplify too much, but generally communicates the core content of a piece of law well.

We can tweak this up and down, targeting it at high school level:

Unless you and your neighbour agree otherwise, or a court orders differently, you should build the fence so that its middle sits right on the boundary line between your properties. If the fence uses posts for support or is built around posts, you should place these posts exactly on the boundary line. If that’s not practical, you should put the posts as close to the boundary line as you can manage.

Or seeing if we can explain it to someone who might have only recently learnt the word “fence” at kindergarten:

When you and your neighbour build a fence, you should put the middle of it right on the line between your gardens. This is where the fence goes unless you both agree to put it somewhere else or a judge tells you to put it somewhere else.

Sometimes fences have posts to hold them up. If your fence has posts, you should try to put the posts right on the line between your gardens. If you can’t put the posts exactly on the line, put them as close as you can.

We also accidentally discovered that by changing en-NZ to en-PIRATE we could translate the entire law into pseudo-Pirate (if we really wanted to):

Ahoy, matey! Here be th’ law ’bout where ye should be buildin’ yer fence. Unless ye’ve made some other arrangement or th’ court’s ordered somethin’ different, ye should be placin’ th’ middle o’ yer fence right on th’ boundary line between properties. Now, if yer fence be havin’ posts fer support or as part o’ its structure, ye should be puttin’ those posts right on th’ boundary line too. But if that ain’t possible, get ’em as close as ye can to that line, ye scurvy dog!

From a more practical point of view, we’re currently looking at the possibilities of making the law available not just in plain English, but in a plainer, more straightforward version of any language people might find useful. Here’s a first pass at Tagalog (kindly verified as making sense by one of our team):

Kung walang ibang napagkasunduan o iniutos ng korte, ang gitna ng bakod ay dapat nasa hangganan ng lupa. Kapag ang bakod ay sinusuportahan ng mga poste o ginawa sa paligid ng mga poste, ang mga poste ay dapat ilagay sa mismong hangganan o kasing lapit ng posible dito.

We’ll be releasing more information about our Plain Language Law project over the next week.