In the courtroom, language is never neutral. It can elucidate the truth or shroud it in shadow, protect the innocent or silence the vulnerable. From the arcane tangle of legal jargon to the errors of transcription, and from bias against accent or dialect, to the disregard of quiet voices, language wields the power to determine an individual’s fate in court. This article argues that language is not a mere tool of the law—it is its very substance, delivering both justice and, sometimes, injustice.
Most of us will have experience of how convoluted and often frankly unintelligible legal language can be—with its jargon, Latinisms, obscure textual strategies and fossilised formulas—and of the difficulty of decoding a legal ruling or disentangling an argument between lawyers. Because it is technical (a “language for specific purposes” as linguistics professionals refer to it), legal language has to some extent an unavoidable, built-in, degree of complexity. But this complexity is compounded by its archaism, stemming from practices that sometimes date back many centuries. Superfluous stylistic flourishes in the way legal language is used can make it still more obscure, alienating citizens from their institutions.
