19 Oct History of Legal Language Notes
As a discipline, “law and language” has barely 40 years of science.4 But there are discussions about the relationship long before contemporary critical thinking emerges. Bentham was a conscious innovator of both legal language (“codification,” “international law”) and new forms of study of the structure of law. With the ultimate goal of establishing a structure within which legislative reform would take place, Bentham was prepared to “establish the meaning of concepts”5, so as not to be constrained by contemporary models. Bentham also developed what we call deontic logic.6 Modern English vocabulary relies heavily on Germanic languages, French, and Latin, the latter primarily via French. These vocabularies are preferably used in various registers, where words of French origin are more formal than those of Germanic origin and words of Latin origin are more formal than those of French origin. Thus, the extensive use of French and Latin words in legal English leads to a relatively formal style. The scope and scope of legal language is very broad, because legal language deals with the common man. There is a general view (धारणा) regarding legal language that an ordinary man cannot understand legal language because it is a technical issue. Only legal experts are able to understand the technicality of legal language because they have the ability to understand it. From 1066, Latin was the language of official registers and statutes. But that was not the language of legal advocacy or debate. The Plea Statute, issued in France 1356, stipulated that all trials should be recorded in English, but in Latin.
For Sarat, violence as “both a linguistic and a physical phenomenon, as fact and metaphor, is an integral part of the constitution of modern law”.[25] Thus, “the courtroom and the discourse of the trial provide a particularly important place to observe how violence and pain penetrate language”.26 West`s concern is the absence of a political state shaped by law. of “the subjugation of others, through fratricidal and infantile violence”.27 The rule of law is not there to “frustrate politics, but to make it possible”.28 And politics is “the means by which communities and individuals create meaning”.29 Much work on the relationship between law and language is now written by linguists and other social scientists (linguistic anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists). That linguistics has gained a foothold in the intellectual world is indisputable. It is also clear that language is a social phenomenon and that its use is instrumental. Through language, social institutions, including legal ones, are established. Language skills can facilitate our understanding of the substance of the law. For example, about 20 years ago, Janet Ainsworth explained why interrogation officers were sometimes allowed to ignore suspects` requests for legal assistance during interrogation.47 In Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice, Lawrence Solan and Peter Tiersma identified 48 sites critical to the functioning of semantics and hermeneutics in criminal procedure. Another area where language and linguistics have played a role is constitutional law. There is a significant example in the United States, where freedom of expression is protected by the Constitution.49 But what is “speech”?50 Can it include nonverbal acts that communicate in some way? Is hate speech “behaviour” rather than speech and therefore not protected?51 Some of the abundant literature on the subject uses the tools of speech theory and philosophy of language.52 During this period, legal English was influenced by Latin and French. After the Norman invasion of England in 1066, Anglo-Norman France became the official language of England. For nearly 300 years, it was the language of court proceedings. As a result, many words used in modern legal English are derived from Anglo-Norman, these words are property, furniture, succession, lease, etc.
The area where language skills have their greatest influence is legal interpretation, particularly statutory interpretation. This was at its peak when the literal rule dominated.53 This rule (or the canon of construction) requires judges to determine the meaning of a text acontextually.54 To support it, they developed interpretative maxims: examples are eiusdem generis 55 and expressio unius, exclusio alterius.56 Judges in the United Kingdom are now more committed to the targeted interpretation of legislative documents.57 These canons of interpretation have, Unsurprisingly, it has faced a lot of criticism recently. Nevertheless, using the tools of linguistic pragmatics, in particular Grice`s notion of conversational involvement,60 Sinclair58 and Miller,59 have shown that the canons mentioned are linguistic generalizations about language. In Law In The Courts of Love,38 subtitled “Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudence,” Goodrich offers us a history of literacy and legal texts constituting “minor jurisprudence”.39 These represent “the strangeness of language and thus the possibilities of interpretation as well as plural forms of knowledge”,40 to redefine law with “subject, person, person, . Emotion” and thus allows “the dialogue or attention to the singularity that justice or ethics require”.41 He further argues that “the literary genre of law is used to restore the uncertainty and undecidability of written law.” .