WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

This could go on for hours. As a matter of fact is did. And incidentally, the
legal point which the learned justice was making so crystal clear had not the slightest
bearing on the decision in the case.
But it would be far too easy to pile up example after example of the nonsense
that is legal language. The quoted tidbit is, of course, an exaggerated instance. But
it is exaggerated only in degree and not in kind. Almost all legal sentences, whether
they appear in judges’ opinions, written statutes, or ordinary bills of sale, have a way
of reading as though they had been translated from the German by someone with a
rather meager knowledge of English. Invariably they are long. Invariably they are
awkward. Invariably and inevitably they make plentiful use of the abstract, fuzzy,
clumsy words which are so essential to the solemn hocus-pocus of The Law.
Now it is generally conceded that the purpose of language, whether written,
spoken, or gestured, is to convey ideas from one person to another. The best kind of
language, the best use of language, is that which conveys ideas most clearly and
most completely, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce notwithstanding. But the
language of The Law seems almost deliberately designed to confuse and muddle the
ideas it purports to convey. That quality of legal language can itself be useful on
only one supposition. It can be useful only if the ideas themselves are so confused
and muddled and empty that an attempt to express those ideas in clear, precise
language would betray their true nature. In that case muddiness of expression can
serve very nicely to conceal muddiness of thought. And no segment of the English
language in use today is so muddy, so confusing, so hard to pin down to its supposed
meaning, as the language of The Law. It ranges only from the ambiguous to the
completely incomprehensible.
To the non-lawyer, legal language is, as mentioned before, to all intents and
purposes a foreign tongue. It uses words and phrases which are totally unfamiliar to
him. Or it uses words and phrases which he can find in his vocabulary but uses them
in such a way that he is immediately aware that they must mean, in The Law,
something quite different from what they mean to him. Or, on the rare occasions
when a whole legal sentence seems to be made up of familiar words taken in their
accustomed meaning, the sentence itself is likely to be so constructed that it doesn’t
make common sense. Oh well, the non-lawyer will say with a shrug, I suppose it
means something to a lawyer.
That is why people rarely bother to read insurance policies or mortgages or
acts of Congress. They know perfectly well that they will never be able to grasp
most of the ideas that are allegedly being conveyed. Even if a legally-phrased
document of one kind or another is of the upmost personal importance to the man
who signs it or hears of it, he will seldom make the painful effort of trying to get
clear in his head what the funny language in which it is written is supposed to mean.
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