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Product Description
Why is legal language so different from ordinary English? Statutes, judicial opinions, contracts, deeds and wills profoundly affect our daily lives, but their language tends to be convoluted, antiquated and often nearly impossible for the public to understand. So where did the "lessees" and "tortfeasors" come from and are they necessarily here to stay? This history of legal language slices through the polysyllabic thicket of legalese. It shows to what extent legalese is simply a product of its past, when Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, Latin-speaking missionaries, Scandinavian raiders and Norman invaders all left their marks on the language that lawyers use today. Peter Tiersma suggests, however, that history alone provides an inadequate explanation for the peculiarities of legal language. He considers how lawyers cling to their foreign-sounding language because it convinces laypeople that the legal system is far too complex to navigate without professional assistance. Obscurity, Tiersma suggests, can also be strategic (as when an insurance company prints oppressive legal terms in small type on the back of a policy), as can clarity (if lawyers need to persuade a jury of their client's innocence, they speak and write with newfound ease). All these issues are wrapped up in the legal language that continues to evolve and shape our culture. This text demonstrates that arcane vocabulary is not an inevitable feature of our legal system and Tiersma concludes with a call for simplification. It brings the verbiage of leases, employment agreements and other consumer documents out of the shadows.
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Our law is a law of words. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Our law is a law of words. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Mr. Tiersma's book is a wonderful shibboleth into the miasmatic and confusing world of the legal lexicon. A superlative source for clear prose. Wait, I thought that it was lawyers who used confusing language.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A thoughtful, linguistic perspective on legal language.
10 July 2002
Format:Paperback
I'm a teacher of legal writing, and I want all my students to read this book--and every lawyer, too. It offers insights into legal language that I have not seen anywhere else: how lawyers use language to set themselves apart; how statutes employ archaisms to present an air of authority; how jury instructions confuse jurors.
It also presents the many reasons that legal language came to be the way it is, while avoiding simplistic explanations. And though it discusses many ways that legal language fails us, it gives just as many ways to improve it.
Most important, the book takes legal language seriously, calling it a "sublanguage" of English and "a set of linguistic features that are superimposed on everyday speech." At the same time, it recognizes that lawyers who care about communicating will have to make difficult decisions about what parts of legal language to keep and what parts to abandon.
4 of 18 people found the following review helpful
wonderful demystification of the club
1 Feb 1999
Format:Hardcover
Mr. Tiersma's book is a wonderful shibboleth into the miasmatic and confusing world of the legal lexicon. A superlative source for clear prose. Wait, I thought that it was lawyers who used confusing language.
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