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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]
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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 

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