Legal Language and the Search for Clarity

Legal Language and the Search for Clarity
Practice and Tools
Anne Wagner & Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy (eds)

493 pp | Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2006
ISBN 3-03911-169-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-8388-5  pb. | $79.95

Book Description: This interdisciplinary collection with contributions in English and French explores how the various disciplines of law and linguistics appreciate and work towards improving the nature of clarity and obscurity in legal language. For the first time, it brings together legal academics and practitioners, jurilinguists and linguists from the common law and civil law with the specific aim to understand the complex nature, practice and tools of clarity and obscurity in legal drafting. Topics addressed include how the Clarity framework has been put into practice through the use of plainer language, better comprehensibility, readability and access to legal or administrative texts. In an attempt to reflect the more recent development of the Clarity-Obscurity debate, the editors have also focused on the use of specific instruments to respond to the problems raised by obscurity to improve clarity.