How come all legal documents, including laws are written in Legal Jargon?
spaceshotx7 asked:
I notice that all laws or legal documents are written using complicated Legal Jargon that often children may not understand. How come Laws and legal documents have to be written a certain way, instead of being written normally? For example: Legal documents including complex words like notwithstanding, hereafter, shall, provision, etc. If anyone is a lawyer, please answer this question.
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I notice that all laws or legal documents are written using complicated Legal Jargon that often children may not understand. How come Laws and legal documents have to be written a certain way, instead of being written normally? For example: Legal documents including complex words like notwithstanding, hereafter, shall, provision, etc. If anyone is a lawyer, please answer this question.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
I’d like to know this too. Tenzin
November 27th, 2009 at 2:49 am
You don’t have to be a lawyer to answer your question, they are written in such a way as to make it almost impossible to misinterpret their meaning, it’s much easier afterwards to have them written or explained in layman’s terms which would take much longer, but for a legal document brevity and conciseness is the order of the day. Ron
November 28th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Unfortunately, legal documents and statutes are written by lawyers for lawyers. Non-lawyers (the people who must actually live with the documents on a day-to-day basis) are almost irrelevant to the process.
Let’s assume that a lawyer is drafting a contract for a business transaction. The lawyer will be negotiating with another lawyer. They are both familiar with legal jargon. They use it. Moreover, if there is a dispute about the meaning of the document, it will be interpreted by a judge — another lawyer. The fact that non-lawyers may not understand the document simply makes it better. That makes the lawyers indispensable, because nobody else can understand the document.
Another poster said that documents are written in jargon to make it “almost impossible to misinterpret their meaning.” That is nonsense. In fact, legal jargon is frequently used to cloud meaning. A contract or statute is very often the product of difficult negotiation. Lawyers frequently use deliberate ambiguity — language that can be interpreted in a number of different ways — to avoid a negotiating roadblock. This allows each side to claim that the language means what that side wants. As a result, the disagreement is postponed until there is a concrete dispute as to meaning.
It is also not true that “brevity and conciseness is the order of the day” in legal drafting. Quite the opposite. Just take a look at the 2,000-page health care bill or an 80-page single-spaced contract with multiple exhibits. Legal drafting is the opposite of conciseness. Sage
November 30th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
It is no different than business documents being written in business jargon or any other type of business, if you want it legal, it has to be written in legal jargon. how simple is that? julvrug