Peculiarities of Legal Texts
This lecture familiarizes the students with:
A legal text is something very different from ordinary speech. This is especially true of authoritative legal texts: those that create, modify, or terminate the rights and obligations of individuals or institutions. Such texts are what J.L. Austin might have called written performatives. Lawyers often refer to them as operative or dispositive.
Authoritative legal texts come in a variety of genres. They include documents such as:
Language peculiarities
Legal language, broadly construed as the language of the legal profession, has been the object of numerous studies, many of which advocate reforming it to make it more understandable to the ordinary citizens whose lives and fortunes may be affected by it. Many pejorative adjectives have been used to describe the language of the law, including "wordy," "unclear," "pompous," and "dull." More specifically, the literature on legal language suggests that it differs in a number of ways from ordinary speech:
1. Technical terminology (such as seisin, testator, libel per quod, hedonic damages).
2. Archaic, formal, and unusual or difficult vocabulary (such as said/aforesaid; to wit; hereinafter).
3. Impersonal Constructions (avoidance of the first and second person pronouns "I" and "you"; judges referring to themselves as "the court").
4. Nominalizations ("the injury occurred...").
5. Passive constructions ("the girl was injured...").
6. Multiple Negation ("innocent misrecollection is not uncommon").
7. Long and Complex Sentences (sometimes hundreds of words long).
8. Wordiness and redundancy ("I give, devise and bequeath the rest, residue and remainder of my estate...").
Individual work
- types of legal texts;
- lexical, grammatical and stylistic features of the legal texts;
A legal text is something very different from ordinary speech. This is especially true of authoritative legal texts: those that create, modify, or terminate the rights and obligations of individuals or institutions. Such texts are what J.L. Austin might have called written performatives. Lawyers often refer to them as operative or dispositive.
Authoritative legal texts come in a variety of genres. They include documents such as:
- constitutions
- contracts
- deeds
- orders/judgments/decrees
- pleadings
- statutes
- wills
Language peculiarities
Legal language, broadly construed as the language of the legal profession, has been the object of numerous studies, many of which advocate reforming it to make it more understandable to the ordinary citizens whose lives and fortunes may be affected by it. Many pejorative adjectives have been used to describe the language of the law, including "wordy," "unclear," "pompous," and "dull." More specifically, the literature on legal language suggests that it differs in a number of ways from ordinary speech:
1. Technical terminology (such as seisin, testator, libel per quod, hedonic damages).
2. Archaic, formal, and unusual or difficult vocabulary (such as said/aforesaid; to wit; hereinafter).
3. Impersonal Constructions (avoidance of the first and second person pronouns "I" and "you"; judges referring to themselves as "the court").
4. Nominalizations ("the injury occurred...").
5. Passive constructions ("the girl was injured...").
6. Multiple Negation ("innocent misrecollection is not uncommon").
7. Long and Complex Sentences (sometimes hundreds of words long).
8. Wordiness and redundancy ("I give, devise and bequeath the rest, residue and remainder of my estate...").
Individual work
- Find a legal document in English and identify to what type of documents it belongs;
- Underline all the characteristics of legal English that you can find in this document;
- Compare it to a similar document made in Romanian/ Russian. What are the differences and the similarities?