Benefits and Drawbacks of Plain Legal English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56498/1212024615Abstract
The Plain Language Movement acted as the catalyst for the Plain Legal English Movement aimed at
questioning and challenging the clarity of legal language. Mellinkoff’s The Language of the Law
(1963) is one of the most influential publications to emphasise the defects of legal language. In the
search for precision and caution, legal English tends to be verbose, archaic and redundant (Wydick
1978; Tiersma 1999; Williams 2004 and 2011). Tiersma (1999, p. 51) posits that “lawyers seem to
have developed linguistic quirks that have little communicative function and serve mainly to mark
them as members of the legal fraternity”. Legal writing, in fact, is claimed to be “the largest body of
poorly written literature ever created” (Lindsey 1990, p. 2).
The literature has long addressed and discussed legalese, which is an intricate aspect of the
language of the law. Its features are varied, such as nominalisation (Tiersma 1999, pp. 77-79;
Williams 2004, p. 115; Coulthard and Johnson 2010, p. 10), the frequent use of passive forms
(Williams 2004, p. 114), long sentences characterised by syntactic discontinuities and embeddings
(Williams 2004, pp. 113-114; Williams and Milizia 2008, p. 2215; Coulthard and Johnson 2010, p.
22), lack of punctuation (Williams 2004, p. 113; Coulthard and Johnson 2007, p. 45) and deictic
elements where pronouns, particles and adverbs refer back or forward to concepts, things or people
mentioned in the text (Abate 1998, pp. 14-16; Bhatia 2010: 28). Furthermore, legal language is
male-gendered and characterised by sexism as it still uses masculine generics (Griffith 1988: 135;
6 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LAW, LANGUAGE & DISCOURSE, VOL. 12, NO.1 – JUNE 2024.
Leonardi 2021). Some scholars highlight the ambiguity in the use of modal verbs (for example,
“shall” is used to express obligations or prohibitions instead of future actions or scenarios) (Tiersma
1999). There are also archaic expressions sourced from Latin and French, which may be
incomprehensible to laypersons (Laster 2001: 246; Bhatia 2010, pp. 26-29).
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