Plain Language Translations of American Divorce Law
155lawyers, court clerks, domestic violence advocates, and others—plus other
paid staff.^4
Legalese
Non-specialists come into contact with some disciplines that employ
specialist languages more than with others. It is hard for citizens in a
complex modern culture not to come into contact with the specialist
languages of law and medicine, for instance. Contact with the specialist
languages of the social and natural sciences, on the other hand, usually
occurs first through education and later through an interest in personal
discovery, not as a necessity for operating within a modern culture, as is
the case with law and medicine.
The usual first instance for most people to come into contact with legal
language is contract law. A person is supposed to be able to interpret the
contracts required for signing a lease for an apartment of for purchasing a
software package. These contracts are written by lawyers specifically in
order to make an eventual lawsuit result in favor of the more powerful
entity that is the other person or business that the new young consumer has
to deal with. They include as many possible problems and situations as the
lawyers consider worth noting in the contracts. They are thus usually very
long with large sentences and paragraphs. Many of the terms used are
specialist terms specifically so that the court will know exactly to what the
sentence is referring.
The popular term for these ponderous, difficult-to-understand documents
is “legalese”, as if the “language” is something other than the actual
language in which the contracts are written.^5
Court forms likewise have suffered from the writing of lawyers who
try their best to handle all possible situations and to include specialist
terms in order to be clearer for the courts’ eventual decision. Since court
forms usually describe a particular situation that has already occurred or
needs to occur, they should be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Good
lawyers have taken general forms and used them only as guides in writing
their own pleadings (making sure they have all the necessary elements)
and have removed those sentences and words that are unnecessary.
(^4) For a fuller account of the Project, and for citations to the facts presented in this
section see Dyer et al. (2014).
(^5) There has been some good work from law professors and law researchers on the
problems of legalese. Notable are Law Professor Peter Tiersma (Tiersma 1999)
and Law Professor Lawrence Solan (Solan 2003, Solan 2005). Both are trained
linguists, but not cognitive linguists.