Benefits and Drawbacks of Plain Legal English

The Plain Language Movement acted as the catalyst for the Plain Legal English Movement aimed at questioning and challenging the clarity of legal language. Mellinkoff’s The Language of the Law (1963) is one of the most influential publications to emphasise the defects of legal language. In the search for precision and caution, legal English tends to be verbose, archaic and redundant (Wydick 1978; Tiersma 1999; Williams 2004 and 2011). Tiersma (1999, p. 51) posits that “lawyers seem to have developed linguistic quirks that have little communicative function and serve mainly to mark them as members of the legal fraternity”. Legal writing, in fact, is claimed to be “the largest body of poorly written literature ever created” (Lindsey 1990, p. 2).