Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements, second edition
- List of Panels and Tables
- Table of Statutes and Subsidiary Legislation
- Table of Cases
- Introduction
- 1 What Influences the Legal Drafter
- 2 How Legal Documents are Interpreted
- 3 The Move towards Modern English in Legal Drafting
- 4 Some Benefits of Drafting in Plain English
- 5 What to Avoid when Drafting Modern Documents
- 6 How to Draft Modern Documents
- 7 Using the Modern Style
- Further Reading
- Index
3 - The Move towards Modern English in Legal Drafting
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements, second edition
- List of Panels and Tables
- Table of Statutes and Subsidiary Legislation
- Table of Cases
- Introduction
- 1 What Influences the Legal Drafter
- 2 How Legal Documents are Interpreted
- 3 The Move towards Modern English in Legal Drafting
- 4 Some Benefits of Drafting in Plain English
- 5 What to Avoid when Drafting Modern Documents
- 6 How to Draft Modern Documents
- 7 Using the Modern Style
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The modern style of legal drafting owes much to the plain English movement in law. This chapter considers the history of that movement in a number of countries, concentrating on the period from the 1960s to date.
We begin with a reminder that calls to simplify legal language are hardly new. We mentioned some early examples in Chapter 1. A number of leading nineteenth century reformers made scathing attacks on lawyers' language. Jeremy Bentham was particularly vitriolic in attacking the argument that ‘precision’ or ‘certainty’ demanded a repetitious style:
For this redundancy – for the accumulation of excrementitious matter in all its various shapes, in all its various forms … for all the pestilential effects that cannot but be produced by this so enormous load of literary garbage, the plea commonly pleaded [is] … that it is necessary to precision – or to use the word which on similar occasions they themselves are in the habit of using, certainty.
Later in the nineteenth century, the English barrister George Coode published his influential book, On Legislative Expression. In it, he rejected the convoluted style of traditional legal drafting: ‘Nothing more is required than that instead of an accidental and incongruous style, the common popular structure of plain English be resorted to.’
Many of Bentham's and Coode's suggestions were adopted by Lord Macaulay in his Indian Penal Code, described by a modern legislative drafter as ‘to this day a shining example of legal wisdom and clarity’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modern Legal DraftingA Guide to Using Clearer Language, pp. 76 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006