What makes legal language “legal”?

Last Updated on April 4, 2024 by Ranking

The concept of legal language: what makes legal language “legal”?

The aim of the article is to present the concept of legal language. As with almost any legal term (and perhaps all terms), its meaning is shaped, transformed, and may be revealed through discursive practice. In other words, the meaning of “legal language” depends on how it is used, talked about and thought about. Insight into social reality can help illuminate the boundaries and definitions of legal language.

Legal concepts and provides guidance for future users. Assuming that legal concepts are shaped by the way they are used by legal practitioners and that legal language is a technical term, we can look for the meaning of this concept in legal discursive practice. Only those with a legal education or those deeply interested in law and language can shed light on this issue.

Legal language is an interdisciplinary term because it influences (at least) law and linguistics. The meaning of this term should be sought at the intersection of both fields. An ideal proponent of this combination, with a background in law and language, is Peter M. Tiersma: The Concept of Legal Language.

Peter M. Tiersma considers legal language to be the language of lawyers. For him, it is not just a tool for lawyers, it affects the everyday life of virtually everyone. Legal language has limited subject matter and its own specific grammatical rules. It differs from colloquial language not only in its lexis, but also in its morphology, syntax and semantics.

The language of lawyers remains unclear and incomprehensible to the layman. Tiersma suggests it could also be the adversarial nature of legal language or economic considerations. He also mentions the idea that legal language is ritualistic, giving the speaker a sign of belonging to the community.

Law and language have much in common and can be considered sign systems, although they also have a communicative form. Legal semiotics accepts this dual nature of language and focuses on the signs themselves and how they are used in communication as the creation and discovery of meaning. For example, Roberta Kevelson, perhaps the founder of legal semiotics, emphasizes that law is understood as a language.

Law can take the form of both an abstract system of norms (even compared to signs by some) and communication. Lawyers move between two different modes of communication and, by “translating” one into the other, they create meaning in incomprehensible ways. Legal pragmatics focuses exclusively on individual communication and uses various methods.

Legal language can be described as language that must be translated into everyday language to be understood by laypeople.
The approaches used basically confirm only a broad view of the legal language described in relation to the pragmatics of law.

Legal language is any “language of, and related to, law and legal process.” This includes legal language, language about the law, and language used in other legal communication situations. Legal language includes texts written by lawyers, including: contracts and court documents. It also includes private contracts, witness statements and other documents used in court disputes.

The concept of legal language: what constitutes legal language?

A common feature of almost all concepts is the emphasis on the heterogeneity of legal language. There is almost unanimous opinion that legal language has its roots in everyday language, although there are some differences. Legal language as a register should contain many types of features that should be selected and applied in a specific communicative act. We need to find out what the situational circumstances that trigger the use of legal language should be.

The term “register” seems best suited and appropriate as a description of legal language. Criteria like “too complicated” or “incomprehensible” can basically be described as the definition of a neighborhood. The most frequently used criterion is the character of the speakers as lawyers.

Legal language is embedded primarily in the legal environment. It could almost be one of the privileges that symbolically gives an otherwise “ordinary” person the status of a person capable of practicing law or at least belonging to an elite group of people. Legal language may be subject to imitation.

Prototype theory can help answer these questions. This theory has played an important role in considering borderline cases of the meanings of terms. It may be surprising that this theory has much in common with Hart’s thesis about the open structure of law. Legal language can be imitated. A typical example is the common practice of using “copy-paste” contracts.

We can move on to the second question presented above, namely whether any text or speech written or spoken by a lawyer should be considered legal language. For example, imagine a lawyer talking to her secular husband or children about dinner plans. I am sure that while lawyers can incorporate the specifics of legal jargon into relatively ordinary conversations, such utterances will not constitute a prototypical example. The concept of legal language should include more criteria than just “lawyers’ language”

The concept of legal language can be described using the Aristotelian distinction between genus proximum and differentia specifica. However, the meaning of the term “language” needs to be adjusted to more accurately reflect what it represents. This means that it is not a natural, national language, but is a certain register of it.

There are usually three situations of communicative acts related to legal language. The first case concerns the conative function of the act, which means that the norm should apply to a specific addressee. The second case may be a lawyer when he refers to the law (in the course of performing his work/employment). Third, certain activities in the legislative process should be included, such as communication within the legislative body.

Legal language is a register that uses appropriate signs and rules for their use, in accordance with the given message and its purpose. The best characterization is to compare the criteria of specific communicative acts, especially their specific pragmatic (non-linguistic) role. This article can help to illuminate the meaning and scope of this term so that future research on legal language can build on this definition. Although at first glance legal language may not be a typical legal term, it is undoubtedly an important concept for jurisprudence and legal theory.