In Which I Go Out of Character and Strike a Blow for Concision

So, if you read this blog (which you appear to), you probably know that I tend to write rather lengthy blog posts. The same is true of basically everything I ever write: it gets long. I'd like to think, however, that most of the length is not just due to pointless excess verbiage, but rather because I'm just saying a lot of stuff. Regardless, there's a kind of irony in my critiquing someone else on grounds of insufficient concision. But what can I do when I read a sentence like this one:

The refusal of a legal order to recognize itself as hierarchically integrated into a more comprehensive legal order is justified, if the more comprehensive legal order suffers from a structural legitimacy deficit that the less comprehensive legal order does not suffer from.

Oh. My. God. Let me rephrase that:

The refusal of a legal order to recognize itself as hierarchically integrated into a more comprehensive legal order is justified, if the more comprehensive legal order is less structurally legitimate than the less comprehensive legal order.

I only altered the italicized part. I cut the part I modified down by maybe 40%. I'm pretty sure I cut the amount of stuff-that-gets-said in that part by precisely 0%. Seriously, what's the point of the "suffers from a structural legitimacy deficit" construction? The related phrase "democratic deficit" or "democracy deficit" keeps popping up in various forms of comparative constitutional law/theory that I've been encountering of late, and it drives me crazy. What's a democracy deficit? Deficit means shortfall, shortfall implies a baseline (e.g., the federal budget deficit is the shortfall of federal revenues relative to the baseline of federal outlays), so what's the baseline? Maximum Conceivable Democracy? Well that would be lovely, but in that case there's a "democracy deficit" everywhere and that's not really a huge problem because we live in an imperfect world and we do the best we can. If not that, then... what? The most democratic object in the frame of reference? Okay, but then why not just use plain old comparative language like what I used in my rewrite up above? It's a lot shorter and less jargon-y and you end up saying something that sounds a lot more like the natural way to say the thing you mean to say. Sheesh.


(I know it's been a while since I've written any posts, and that this is kind of a curious one to break up the drought. The trouble with law school is that I'm busy and I also have no shortage of actual people to discuss my ideas with, which means I feel less impetus to process those ideas by blogging about them. On the bright side I don't think I have any actual regular readers to whom I'm not related, so there probably aren't a ton of people aggrieved by my shortcomings in this regard.)