Legal ease and ‘Legalese’

Abstract

This paper reviews the evidence for Redish's (1979) seven propositions concerning legal text. These propositions are: (i) many legal documents cannot be read and understood by lay persons; (ii) people without legal training have to read and understand legal documents; (iii) much legal writing is unintelligible, even to lawyers; (iv) tradition – not necessity – and a lack of understanding of the audience – are the major reasons that legal language is so obscure; (v) legal language can be made clear without losing its precision; (vi) it is not the technical vocabulary but the complex sentence structure that makes legal writing difficult to understand; and (vii) clarity is not the same as simplicity, brevity or ‘Plain English’. The evidence supports all of these propositions, except perhaps the fifth and sixth. The research shows that writing legal text requires more attention to be given to readers than is typically the case.

Key Words:

• legalese
• plain English
• legal drafting
• writing
• readability