Language in Law

California Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan has said that "the law lives in its language." And not only the statutes themselves, but contracts, testimony and sometimes evidence consist solely of words. But what do the words mean?

Linguistic Analysis

Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of language can clarify obscure or potentially ambiguous clauses and phrases. Does a particular adjective in a contract apply to the two conjoined nouns following it or just the first one? When the officer said, "Will you please step out of the car," was he making a request or giving an order? Is the letter offering a business proposition really a threat?

Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are subfields within the broader discipline of Linguistics, which is the study of how language works. Syntactic analysis considers the rules of a language used to put words together to make phrases and sentences. Semantics is the study of how literal meaning is created. Pragmatics addresses the issue of how the speaker's or author's meaning changes depending on the context of an utterance or a document.

I can perform such analyses and more on written or spoken material.

Legal Language

Laws, contracts, and jury instructions are normally written by people immersed in the language of the law. For that reason, they are not always clear to people outside the legal community. This is a situation that I can help remedy.

In addition to my training in Linguistics, I have over ten years' experience as a technical writer. I earned my living making technical material accessible to people outside of the technical disciplines that produced it. In this context, the law is a technical field, with its own vocabulary, its own way of expressing ideas, its own background knowledge shared by its practitioners but not by those outside the field.

If you want legal material to be easily understood by non-lawyers, I can rewrite it in a new format: a booklet explaining some aspect of the law to a specific audience, a contract rewritten as a letter. Or, better, I can help you in the original drafting of the document.

Some of the techniques for making legal language clear to lay people are contained in my unpublished manuscript, "Clarity in Jury Instructions: Ensuring Justice by Explaining the Law to Non-Lawyers." The article describes problems of comprehension with a particular jury instruction used in death penalty cases in California. Using insights from both Linguistics and Technical Communication, I illustrate how the instruction can be improved, so the law beng explained is understood correctly by members of the jury. Please contact me if you would like to see (or publish) the manuscript.