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Part of
Legal Pragmatics
Edited by Dennis Kurzon and Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 288] 2018
► pp. 101–116

Chapter 5
Making legal language clear to legal laypersons

| University of Haifa

It is widely accepted that the legal sub-language – the language of the written law, court discussions, and legal documents – needs rephrasing in order to make it understandable to legal laypersons. Adler (2012) holds that this is possible: legal texts can be rephrased in plain language (rather than in “legalese”). The features that need rephrasing in order to make the legal language understandable to legal laypersons concern both the rich technical vocabulary of the legal sub-language and its syntactic complexity. There is, moreover, a third feature that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable for laypersons – implicit intertextual and interdiscursive links. It is the combination of these three features – the rich technical vocabulary, the syntactic complexity, and implicit intertextuality (intertextual links presented without lucid reference to their explanations) – that makes the legal sub-language impenetrable.

The legal sub-language is, naturally, the language used by legal experts in order to communicate with one another. Obviously, legal experts are supposed to know the relevant legal background knowledge of legal texts they work with; therefore, like other human communicators, authors of legal texts imply legal background knowledge, including the background knowledge relevant to their messages, rather than present it explicitly. The point of this analysis is that it is this implied professional knowledge which makes it hard for legal laypersons to understand legal texts.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The legal sub-language
  • 2. Thought experiment
    • 2.1 Revising the text faults
    • 2.2Downloading intertextual links
    • 2.3Deriving authoritative answers
    • 3. Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Law and verdicts
Published online: 26 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.288.05azu
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Law and verdicts

Amendment 39 to the Israeli penal law
(2098, 6.1.1992)Google Scholar
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The Legal Adviser to the Government vs. Bash
Criminal Appeal, 322/87
Dror vs. the State of Israel, Verdicts 723(3)
Criminal Appeal, 402/87
State of Israel vs. Jondi, Verdicts 393(3)
Criminal Appeal 103/88
Moshe Lichtman vs. the State of Israel [6.9.1989] Verdicts 373 (3).
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Engberg, Jan
2022. LSP and Transdiscursive Knowledge Communication. In Specialized Knowledge Mediation, ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Martínez, Eric, Francis Mollica & Edward Gibson
2022. Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language. Cognition 224 ► pp. 105070 ff. DOI logo
Martínez, Eric, Francis Mollica & Edward Gibson
2022. Poor Writing, not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language. SSRN Electronic Journal DOI logo

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