This interdisciplinary collection with contributions in English and French explores how the various disciplines of law and linguistics appreciate and work towards improving the nature of clarity and obscurity in legal language. For the first time, it brings together legal academics and practitioners, jurilinguists and linguists from the common law and civil law with the specific aim to understand the complex nature, practice and tools of clarity and obscurity in legal drafting. Topics addressed include how the Clarity framework has been put into practice through the use of plainer language, better comprehensibility, readability and access to legal or administrative texts. In an attempt to reflect the more recent development of the Clarity-Obscurity debate, the editors have also focused on the use of specific instruments to respond to the problems raised by obscurity to improve clarity. Cette collection interdisciplinaire offrant des contributions en anglais et en français, explore comment les diverses disciplines du droit et de la linguistique appréhendent et visent à perfectionner la nature de la clarté et de l'opacité du discours juridique. Cet ouvrage rassemblant pour la première fois, des universitaires et professionnels du droit, des jurilinguistes et linguistes de la common law and et du droit civil, propose de découvrir la nature complexe, les pratiques et outils de la clarté et de l'opacité utilisés en rédaction juridique. Les questions abordées examinent la mise en pratique de la clarté juridique au travers de l'utilisation de la langue courante, une meilleure lisibilité, compréhensibilité et accès aux textes juridiques et administratifs. Dans le but de refléter l'actualité du débat Clarté-Opacité du discours juridique, les éditrices se sont également concentrées sur l'utilisation des outils et méthodes les plus récents et utilisés pour résoudre les difficultés soulevées par l'opacité des langues du droit et ainsi améliorer la transparence du discours juridique.

Guiding the reader through the pitfalls of legal writing, Adler explains how to prevent ambiguity and mistakes, therefore saving time and getting the message across effectively.

An essential resource for student and teacher clarity With the ever-changing landscape of education, teachers and leaders often find themselves searching for clarity in a sea of standards, curriculum resources, and competing priorities. Clarity for Learning offers a simple and doable approach to developing clarity and sharing it with students through five essential components: crafting learning intentions and success criteria co-constructing learning intentions and success criteria with learners creating opportunities for students to respond effective feedback on and for learning students and teachers sharing learning and progress The book is full of examples from teachers and leaders who have shared their journey, struggles, and successes for readers to use to propel their own work forward.

"A magnificent book on writing. Drawing on the lessons from psycholinguistics and rhetoric, Judge Bacharach has written a remarkably practical book on how to write effectively. Judge Bacharach illustrates his points with very specific suggestions and countless examples from briefs from top lawyers and opinions of judges. I learned so much from this wonderful book." -- Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, Berkeley School of Law

"Originally released to great acclaim in 2010, Typography for Lawyers was the first guide to the essentials of typography aimed specifically at lawyers. Author Matthew Butterick, an attorney and Harvard-trained typographer, dispelled the myth that legal documents are incompatible with excellent typography. Butterick explained how to get professional results with the tools you already have quickly and easily. Revised and updated & the second edition includes: new topics such as email, footnotes, alternate figures, and OpenType features; avice for presentations, contracts, grids of numbers, and court opinions; technical tips covering the newest versions of Word and WordPerfect for Windows and OS X; new font recommendations, including two that are free; new essays on the font copyrights, screen-reading considerations, and typographic disputes that have reached the courts; a refreshed layout, featuring type features designed by the author."--from Amazon.com website.

This history of legal language slices through the polysyllabic thicket of legalese. The text shows to what extent legalese is simply a product of its past and demonstrates that arcane vocabulary is not an inevitable feature of our legal system.

This volume presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of major developments in the study of how phraseology is used in a wide range of different legal and institutional contexts. This recent interest has been mainly sparked by the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the centrality of phraseological patterns in language and provided researchers with new and powerful analytical tools. However, there have been relatively few empirical studies of word combinations in the domain of law and in the many different contexts where legal discourse is used. This book seeks to address this gap by presenting some of the latest developments in the study of this linguistic phenomenon from corpus-based and interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume draws on current research in legal phraseology from a variety of perspectives: translation, comparative/contrastive studies, terminology, lexicography, discourse analysis and forensic linguistics. It contains contributions from leading experts in the field, focusing on a wide range of issues amply illustrated through in-depth corpus-informed analyses and case studies. Most contributions to this book are multilingual, featuring different legal systems and legal languages. The volume will be a valuable resource for linguists interested in phraseology as well as lawyers and legal scholars, translators, lexicographers, terminologists and students who wish to pursue research in the area.

Exploring the intricate and multi-dimensional conception of clarity and obscurity in law, this volume presents and examines the most recent research and theories. It provides practical guidance on how to avoid obscurity in legal drafting, as well as legal interpretation at both the national and international levels.

This volume offers insights into the ways in which plain language has influenced the language of the law in the United Kingdom, critically reflecting on its historical development and future directions. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical frameworks underpinning plain language and a brief history of plain language initiatives as a foundation from which to outline ongoing debates on the opportunities and challenges of using plain language in the legal domain. The volume details strands where plain language has had considerable impact thus far on legal English in the UK, notably in legislative drafting, but it also explores areas in which plain language has made fewer inroads, such as the language of court judgments and that of online terms and conditions. The book looks ahead to unpack highly topical areas within the plain language debate, including the question of design and visualisation and the ramifications of digitalisation, contributing to ongoing conversations on the importance of plain language both in the UK and beyond. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of language and the law as well as related disciplinary areas such as applied linguistics and English for Specific Purposes.