From the wiki:
Remember, law priority is enforced by the order they are listed. A law is invalid if it causes a conflict with either: Previous laws in the form of conflicting orders, or it challenges the procession of law priority. For example, a law that includes "This Law overrides all other Laws." is invalid and must be disregarded.
This is the basis of how laws work. So yes, Asimov is needlessly wordy.
Any law saying to ignore a previous law can be totally ignored. Any law contradicting an earlier law can be totally ignored.
As far as the previous conversation, regarding 'discipline' vs harm, come on.... the law says "Don't harm humans". It should be obvious that calling harm 'discipline' doesn't change the fact that it's harm. If you're trying to use a harmbaton, it's even more obvious...
What was up with the round last night where the heads (except me, the CE) decided it was a good idea to upload corporate, plus a bunch of extra contradictory laws to the AI. I thought the rule was that unnecessarily changing AI laws as non traitor isn't allowed. Not that it made much difference in the end, due to a bomb taking out the AI's core cameras, it couldn't shut down its turrets to let us fix all the breaches, so I had to shut off its APC, since apparently the rest of the command crew went braindead, so nobody had acc... I am quite sorry to the AI player for taking you out of the round, I just couldn't see any way around it.