This paper studies legal language from three perspectives. First, legal language is defined as the variety of English that lawyers, judges, and other members of the legal community use in the course of their work. In a second section, it reviews descriptions of legal language by lawyers, linguists, and social scientists. These studies indicate…

Efforts to simplify language used in consumer documents come from the consumer movement and a public disillusioned with big business and government. Even before President Carter's 1978 executive order mandating simplification in government regulations, some agencies were revising regulations for clarity. However, these efforts were based on too…

Legal language is discussed in the context of concern about the comprehensibility of consumer documents and the trend toward simplification of the language used in these documents. Specific features of legal language and its functions within the legal community and society are identified. As a primary tool of the legal profession, legal language…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

The simplification of legal language is required by President Carter's Executive Order requiring "clear and simple English" in government regulations. A major problem in the simplification process is the absence of any adequate description or classification of legal language. This paper defines some specific features of legal language,…