How to Read a Contract

What a social contract is

A contract between persons who implement it on a territory. They make it as they see fit, and it holds between those who accept it. A few cannot sign others into it, unless that too is agreed in the contract.

The parties can agree on what breaching a grievous part costs, for example forfeiting properties or estates, exile, or loss of citizenship. The same parties can overrule it: they can re-admit the person and hand back their possessions. Consequences are set by the composition, so the same clause can carry different consequences in different societies.

Before you say “I do”

Any doubt you have about a contract, before you agree to it, can be tested in the open. Raise it as an issue. It is digested into a proposal the composer can test: which intents it serves, what it conflicts with, and which assumptions separate it from the contract. Everyone can see how each doubt was resolved.

Raise a doubt · See how others’ doubts were resolved

Four rules of reading

1. Remember what the intents are.

   The intents are what the contract is for. Every clause is a means to them and is read as one. When the wording of a clause seems to allow something that defeats an intent, the intent governs, and the reading is wrong.

2. Deal with the manifest consequences.

   Ask what actually happens when a clause is applied one way or the other, and which intents that outcome serves or violates. A consequence that violates an intent is dealt with as a violation, whichever clause was used to reach it.

3. Call out dramatization detached from reality, in either direction.

   Any rule attracts people who twist its words to their own aims: they exaggerate a situation to unlock a clause, or downplay it to block one, often by refusing to find out what would settle it. Both are stories detached from the actual case. Name them for what they are. What counts is the real condition of the people involved, never the story told about it.

4. Settle disputes case by case, among the competent.

   When readings conflict over a real case, the case is explored by a guild of those competent to judge it, or crowdsourced at the level of competence the case requires. It is not settled by rule-lawyering, or by general opinion. What they find goes back into the contract as claims and evaluations and, where needed, as a new revision.

Example: fatal risk in the pro-pregnancy contract

The intents are to protect mothers at preference over their babies in the womb, and to protect babies. Before the baby is ready, a pregnancy may be aborted only when the mother is at fatal risk, now or on the trajectory she is on. That draws twists from both camps:

The reading that holds: the mother’s survival comes first. Among the courses that secure it, the treating doctor, as a whole, with their competence and the methods they can make work, chooses the one that gives the baby the best chance. Where that is disputed, competent peers explore the case.

Writing with picos

When you raise a doubt or propose a clause, use the contract’s defined words as they are defined; hovering shows the definition. If you use a word in a strict sense that isn’t defined yet, say so: give its definition and the exact words that should refer to it. When the same word has two senses, each gets its own pico with its own words, so a reader can always tell which is meant. Mother thriving and baby thriving in the pro-pregnancy contract are an example.

What the composer shows you

Levels

A milli is a composed Social Contract. It is composed of micros (micro-social-contracts, such as pro-pregnancy), which are made of nanos: intents, clauses, claims, measures and the rest. Picos are strictly defined words, which nanos use by reference.

Pico

A word with a strict definition, such as fatal risk or readiness for extraction. When a nano is written, it records which of its words refer to which pico, and that record never changes. An underlined word shows the definition it was written with; hover or focus it to read it. A newer or better pico never changes what an existing nano says. To adopt it, the nano is rewritten as a new revision. Until then the composer shows any older sense still in use, or two senses of one word in play.

Intent

A purpose you can grasp directly. The intent tree shows how purposes refine into narrower ones.

Clause

An agreement: who shall, shall not or may do what.

Binding

What a clause binds its role to. work means someone has to carry it out. abide means a rule to keep, or else a consequence; that holds only if someone detects breaches, and detection is work too, carried by whichever signatories the composition assigns. liberty means it is permitted, and no one is bound to act.

Claim

A statement that a clause serves (or hinders) an intent, with the context it depends on: the other clauses it needs, and the assumptions it makes about the society. Claims are put up for evaluation, not taken as proven.

Coverage

claimed means a sufficient claim, or covered children. thin means only contributing claims. gap means nothing claims it yet.

Influence

What bears on what, including proxies that stand in for the real thing, like weeks for development or case records for the actual case. Recorded without asserting that it is true.

Disagreement

Two claims about the same clause and intent that reach different conclusions, with the context that separates them. That is where a case exploration starts.