Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T02:46:06.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The limits of plain legal language: understanding the comprehensible style in law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2019

Zsolt Ződi
Zsolt Ződi*
Affiliation:
Corvinus Business School, Department of Infocommunication, Corvinus University of Budapest and Institute for Legal Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The comprehensible style of legal texts seems to be a predominantly linguistic problem. This is how the plain-legal-language movements present it. But, while plain-language statutes have been on the agenda for decades in every civilised country, laws still become more and more complicated. The paper attempts to explain this controversy. First, it argues that comprehensibility has more aspects beyond the linguistic or stylistic one. Sometimes it is the linguistically simplest texts that raise the most serious comprehensibility problems. The paper refers to two pieces of corpus linguistic research that provide evidence that vocabulary and grammar in themselves do not explain the incomprehensibility of the legal texts. Second, for a more subtle handling of the comprehensibility problem, the paper offers a framework of three typical pragmatic situations – the processual, the problem-solving and the compliance settings – where comprehensibility problems arise in different ways. The conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the usual explanation that the main reason for incomprehensibility is that, in law, clarity and accuracy can be only employed at each other's expense, it is rather the systemic and interpretive character of law and the growing importance of technical rules that hinder the understanding of legal texts.

Keywords

law and languagecomprehensibilityPlain English Movementlegal pragmaticstechnical rulesthe Internet
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 15 , Special Issue 3: The Many Faces of ‘Style’ in Law and Legal Scholarship , September 2019 , pp. 246 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adler, M (2012) The Plain English Movement. In Tiersma, PM and Solan, LM (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–83.Google Scholar
Alterman, I (1987) Plain and Accurate Style in Court Papers. Philadelphia, PA: American Law Institute-American Bar Association Committee on Continuing Professional Education.Google Scholar
Austin, JL (1975) How to Do Things With Words, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Benson, R (1984) The end of legalese: the game is over. New York University Review of Law and Social Change 13, 519–574.Google Scholar
Benson, RW and Kessler, JB (1987) Legalese v. plain English: an empirical study of persuasion and credibility in appellate brief writing. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 20, 301–321.Google Scholar
Bennion, F (2007) Confusion over plain language law. The Commonwealth Lawyer 16, 63–68.Google Scholar
Bentham, J (1823) A Fragment on Government. London: Wilson.Google Scholar
Bentham, J (1838) General view of a complete code of laws. In Bowring, J (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 3. Edinburgh: William Tait, pp. 155–211.Google Scholar
Berry, MW (ed.) (2004) Survey of Text-mining, Clustering, Classification and Retrieval. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Biber, D (1995) Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-linguistic Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Biber, D, Conrad, S and Reppen, R (1998) Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bruce, BC, Rubin, AD and Starr, KS (1981) Why readability formulas fail. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication PC-24, 50–52.Google Scholar
Charrow, RP and Charrow, VR (1979) Making legal language understandable: a psycholinguistic study of jury instructions. Columbia Law Review 79, 1306–1374.Google Scholar
Charrow, VR (1987) Linguistics and the jury. University of Bridgeport Law Review 8, 303–314.Google Scholar
Crump, D (2002) Against plain English: the case for a functional approach to legal document preparation. Rutgers Law Journal 33, 713–744.Google Scholar
Csendes, D, Csirik, J, Gyimóthy, T and Kocsor, A (2005) The Szeged Treebank. In Matoušek, V et al. (eds), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2005) Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, Springer LNAI 3658, pp. 123–131.Google Scholar
Curtotti, M and McCreath, E (2013) Right to access implies right to know: an open online platform for research on the readability of law. Journal of Open Access to Law 1, 1–56.Google Scholar
Curtotti, M, Weibel, W, McCreath, E, Ceynowa, N, Frug, S and Bruce, T (2015) Citizen science for citizen access to law. Journal of Open Access to Law 3, 57–120.Google Scholar
DuBay, WH (2004) The Principles of Readability. Impact Information. Available at www.impact-information.com (accessed 29 April 2019).Google Scholar
Elwork, A, Alfini, JJ and Sales, BD (1982) Toward understandable jury instructions. Judicature 65, 432–443.Google Scholar
Fikentscher, W (1977) Methoden des Rechts, Vol. IV. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).Google Scholar
Fletcher, P (1980) On paraphrase. In Prideaux, GD, Derwing, BL and Baker, WJ (eds), Experimental Linguistics: Integration of Theories and Applications. Ghent: E-Story Scientia, pp. 21–34.Google Scholar
Gadamer, H-G (2004) Truth and Method. London/New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Galdia, M (2014) Legal Discourses. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Gries, S and Slocum, BG (2017) Ordinary meaning and corpus linguistics. Brigham Young University Law Review 6, 1417–1472.Google Scholar
Halliday, MAK, McIntosh, A and Strevens, P (1964) The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longmans – Longman Linguistics Library.Google Scholar
Hamann, H and Vogel, F (2017) Evidence-based jurisprudence meets legal linguistics – unlikely blends made in Germany. Brigham Young University Law Review 6, 1473–1502.Google Scholar
Handó, T (2017) 2017 a közérthető bíróság éve [2017 is a year of comprehensibility in courts]. Magyar Hírlap, 10 December [online]. Available at http://magyarhirlap.hu/cikk/100300/Hando_Tunde_2017_a_kozertheto_birosag_eve (accessed 12 January 2018).Google Scholar
Hundt, M, Nesselhauf, N and Biewer, C (2015) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Jackson, BS (1968) Evolution and foreign influence in ancient law. American Journal of Comparative Law 16, 372–390.Google Scholar
Jensen, K (2010) The Plain English Movement's shifting goals. The Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 13, 807–834.Google Scholar
Kimble, J (1994) Answering the critics of plain language. Scribes Journal of Legal Writing 5, 51–85.Google Scholar
Kimble, J (2006) Lifting the Fog of Legalese, Essays on Plain Language. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kornstein, DJ (2010) Unlikely Muse: Legal Thinking and Artistic Imagination. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.Google Scholar
Mattila, H (2006) Comparative Legal Linguistics. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.Google Scholar
Melinkoff, D (1963) The Language of the Law. Boston: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Merryman, JH and Pérez-Perdomo, R (2007) The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America, 3rd edn. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Polenz, P von (1991) Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, I, II and III. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Roznai, Y and Mordechai, N (2015) Access to Justice 2.0: access to legislation and beyond. The Theory and Practice of Legislation 3, 339–369.Google Scholar
Schiess, W (2003) What plain English really is. Scribes Journal of Legal Writing 9, 43–76.Google Scholar
Selzer, JL (1981) Readability is a four-letter word. Journal of Business Communication 18, 23–34.Google Scholar
Solan, LM and Gales, T (2017) Corpus linguistics as tool in legal interpretation. Brigham Young University Law Review 6, 1311–1358.Google Scholar
Stark, J (1994) Should the main goal of statutory drafting be accuracy or clarity? Statute Law Review 15, 207–213.Google Scholar
Strouhal, E (1986) Rechtssprache und Bürokratismus. In Öhlinger, T (ed.), Recht und Sprache. Vienna: Manz.Google Scholar
Tiersma, PM (1999) Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tiersma, PM and Solan, LM (2012) Introduction. In Tiersma, PM and Solan, LM (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vincze, V (2018) A Miskolc Jogi Korpusz nyelvi jellemzői [The linguistic characteristics of Miskolc Legal Corpus]. In Szabó, M and Vinnai, E (eds), A törvény szavai [The Words of Law]. Miskolc: Bíbor, pp. 9–36.Google Scholar
Wilcox, J (1986) The craft of drafting plain-language jury instructions: a study of a sample pattern instruction on obscenity. Temple Law Quarterly 59, 1159–1188.Google Scholar
Wydick, RC (1978) Plain English for lawyers. California Law Review 66, 727–765.Google Scholar
Wydick, RC (2005) Plain English for Lawyers, 5th edn. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ződi, ZS (2018) A jog érthetőségének határai. Meg tudják-e oldani a nyelvészek a jogi szövegek érthetetlenségéek problémáját? [The limits of comprehensibility of law: can linguists solve the problem of incomprehensible legal texts?]. In Szabó, M and Vinnai, E (eds), A törvény szavai [The Words of Law]. Miskolc: Bíbor, pp. 241–260.Google Scholar