WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

He will just trust his lawyer – or somebody else’s lawyer – that it does mean
something, that it means something definite, and that there is a good reason for
saying it in a way that prevents him from understanding it. Sometimes, moreover,
he will later have cause to regret that blind trust.
Yet why – if you think it over for a minute – should people not be privileged to
understand completely and precisely any written laws that directly concern them,
any business documents they have to sign, any code of rules and restrictions which
applies to them and under which they perpetually live? Why should not the ideas,
vitally important to someone as they always are, which are said to lie behind any
glob of legal language, be common property, freely available to anyone interested,
instead of being the private and secret possession of the legal fraternity?
As pointed out previously, The Law, regardless of any intellectual pretensions
about it, does not at bottom deal with some esoteric or highly specialized field of
activity like the artistic valuation of symphonic music or higher calculus or
biochemical experimentation. If it did, there would be reason and excuse for the use
of language unfamiliar and unintelligible to ninety-nine people out of a hundred.
Nor would the ninety-nine have any cause to care. But the fact is that Law deals with
the ordinary affairs of ordinary human beings carrying on their ordinary daily lives.
Why then should The Law use a language – language being, remember, no more
than a means of communicating ideas – which those ordinary human beings cannot
hope to understand?
Certainly a man who enters a business deal of any kind, whether he is buying
a radio on the installment plan or setting up a trust fund to take care of his family,
would seem entitled to know, to his own complete intellectual satisfaction, just what
he is getting out of it and just what he may be getting in for. The legal document he
signs won’t tell him. Certainly a man whose democratically elected government
enacts a law which will regulate him or tax him or do him a favor would seem
entitled to know, if he wants to know, exactly how the new statute is going to affect
him. His lawyer may “advise” him – and may be right or wrong – but reading the
statute won’t tell him. Certainly a man who loses a law suit would seem entitled to
know why he lost it. The court’s opinion won’t tell him. Why? Why doesn’t and
why shouldn’t legal language carry its message of meaning as clearly and fully as
does a cook book or an almanac or a column of classified advertisements to anyone
who wants to know what ideas the words are intended to convey?
The answer is, of course, that the chief function which legal language
performs is not to convey ideas clearly but rather to so conceal the confusion and
vagueness and emptiness of legal thinking that the difficulties which beset any
non-lawyer who tries to make sense out of The Law seem to stem from the language
itself instead of from the ideas – or lack of ideas – behind it. It is the big unfamiliar
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