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The United States of America is known around the world as “the land of the free
and the home of the brave.” However, despite this emphasis on personal freedoms and
liberty for all, our country has a more significant government presence than almost any
other in the world. Almost every aspect of daily life in the United States is impacted by
legislation at some level: the contents of our breakfast cereals are evaluated by the FDA,
the gasoline that fuels our cars is taxed by the national government, and, as per federal
mandate, a portion of our salaries is reserved for Social Security. Law is all around us,
and yet, the average American would have an easier time reciting the Spanish alphabet
than explaining a run-of-the-mill contract or even the terms of service they agreed to in
way to transmit ideas from one brain to another. But what happens when language is
entirely from its intended purpose? How can we as a society govern ourselves by laws
that we cannot read and do not understand? What are the consequences of defining the
legality of our actions in a mess of Latin, French, and archaic formalities? Some
confusion between writer and reader is fairly typical, but legal language presents a case
where the obfuscation is typically intended and patently unavoidable. How did we come
standing reputation for being dense, confusing and nearly impossible to read. However,
despite its current status, legal language has not always been so far removed from
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common language. According to O.V. Mykhailova, legal documents were written in plain
English in Great Britain before the Norman invasion. Following the Norman invasion in
1066, French was adopted as the language of the people and was incorporated into the
laws of Great Britain. As a result, many of the legal terms we still use today are of French
origin, such as property, estate, and chattel. In 1356, the Statute of Pleading mandated
that legal proceedings take place in English but be recorded in Latin, resulting in the use
of a mix of English, Latin, and French in legal proceedings through medieval times
(Mykhailova).
Although American legal proceedings today take place in English, they are still
marked by their French and Latin roots (think ad litem, de facto, and caveat emptor). This
jumble of language alone would be enough to stump many average readers, but legal
English has several other hallmarks that make it particularly tricky to decipher. For
example, legal English is known for featuring labyrinthine sentence structures; sentences
in legal documents are incredibly long and are often redundant and circular in nature,
allowing attorneys to construct a sense of objectivity in legal rhetoric by avoiding the use
can leave audiences with little to no sense of who the subject of a legal document is or
Finally, legal language uses a mix of archaic vocabulary- including words like
“aforesaid,” “herewith,” and “thereunder”- and common words given meanings different
from what a layperson might expect (Tiersma). For example, the average American might
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attempt to harm another person, with the actual confrontation being known as “battery.”
Effectively, a common reader likely would not recognize half of the words in a legal
document, and the half that they did recognize would have a meaning that ran contrary to
their expectations. This makes it nearly impossible for anyone without years of legal
training to decipher the legal English that comprises many of the documents that control
our lives.
But does the average American need to understand legal language? That’s what
lawyers are for, right? While it is true many Americans do hire lawyers to mediate
divorces, help write wills, and settle property disputes, how many people hire a lawyer to
purchase health insurance? The use of legalese became closely tied to health insurance
when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, ensuring that all
Americans would have access to health insurance and entwining our healthcare with the
law.
One might think that a piece of legislation like the Affordable Care Act, one that
would profoundly impact all American citizens, would be carefully explained by the
Washington Post in 2013 (three years after Obamacare was signed into law) revealed that
more than six out of every ten Americans did “not have the information necessary to
understand the changes the law [would] bring” (Somashekar and Craighill). The
confusion surrounding this law created a widespread sense of division regarding the
Affordable Care Act that persists until today. More importantly, more than 29 million
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Americans who could have benefitted from the law remain uninsured due to perceived
prohibitive costs and misinformation about exactly who legally qualifies (Cooper).
through the story of Aaron Schwartz. Schwartz was a 26-year-old social activist who
hung himself in 2013 rather than face a felony lawsuit filed against him for violating the
article database JSTOR’s terms of service by downloading multiple articles with the
buckled under the pressure of a federal lawsuit that treated his actions as a breach of
contract, a fact that would have been obfuscated by a densely rhetorical terms of service
page, which Schwartz would have accepted before utilizing JSTOR (Lessig).
modern humor due to their universal ambiguousness. The average reader is both unable
and unwilling to pore over pages and pages of legal English that they have no hope of
understanding to use an online service, so the terms of service page on any website is
typically skipped over and happily forgotten as the user embarks on the task they need to
accomplish. Even those who do read the terms of service come away with little to no
understanding of what they have read. While Schwartz’s actions were not necessarily
correct, he was being punished for breaching a contract that he could not even
understand, for breaking terms that he might not even have known he agreed to. Is that
fair?
Citizens like Schwartz deserve to have an understanding of the laws to which they
are being held accountable. As quoted by CBC Radio, the director of the Canadian
Research Institute for Law and the Family John-Paul Boyd boldly states:
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We live in a system of justice where the courts are open to all. If we live in
a system that's governed by the rule of law, there's no reason why you
Although Boyd is referring to Canadian law, both the American and Canadian legal
systems utilize the same unjust and obfuscating language. Boyd and other activists like
him have called for a translation of modern laws into plain language in order to make
them more understandable to the citizens that are expected to follow them (Brown).
This may sound like a simple enough solution, but many are unwilling to adopt it.
In the article “A Curious Criticism of Plain Language,” plain language advocate Joseph
Kimble outlines (and disproves) some of the arguments lawyers, specifically Soha
language approach to legal documents. Namely, Turfler and others affirm that using
that are clear to all readers (Kimble 185). They argue that no two readers are alike, so it
would be impossible to write in a style that was accessible to all citizens. Additionally,
Turfler states that to boil down legalese into a language understandable to the average
person would take away from the “art” of legal discourse and serve to discredit the hard
work done by thousands of legal professionals across the country (Kimble 186).
Like Kimble, however, I agree that the benefits of plain legal language outweigh
any negative outcomes identified by Turfler and her compatriots. If we as a nation are
ever going to fully enjoy the freedom we pride ourselves on, we will need to foster an
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understanding of our civic and legal discourse among all of the people of this great
country. Knowledge is power, and right now thousands upon thousands of Americans
are left powerless by their lack of understanding of the laws that govern our actions and
the discourse that fuels our government. It is unethical to hold people to legal standards
they cannot hope to understand without an advanced law degree or the assistance of a
pricey lawyer. With the current upheaval in our political system, it more important now
than ever that citizens have an understanding of their rights as well as the rights of the
federal government. Plain language law would make our legal system accessible to all
Americans, creating an atmosphere where citizens feel safe to exist and coexist and
finally allowing every American to be free from the oppressive boundaries of ignorance.
Works Cited
Brown, Jim. “Is the law too complicated? A call to write laws in plain English.” CBC
banning-dangerous-dogs-and-a-plea-for-plain-language-1.3393360/is-the-law-
too-complicated-a-call-to-write-laws-in-plain-english-1.3393377
Cooper, Lara. “Even With Obamacare, 29 Million People are Uninsured: Here’s Why.”
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/05/10/Even-Obamacare-29-Million-People-
Are-Uninsured-Here-s-Why
Kimble, Joseph. "A Curious Criticism of Plain Language." Legal Communication &
millersville.klnpa.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tru
e&db=a9h&AN=119038108&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Lessig, Lawrence. “Aaron’s Law: Violating a Site’s Terms of Service Should Not Land
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/aarons-law-violating-a-
sites-terms-of-service-should-not-land-you-in-jail/267247/
Mykhailova, O.V. “Legal English.” V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, 2012,
http://dspace.univer.kharkov.ua/bitstream/123456789/7033/2/law_lecture.pdf
http://www.languageandlaw.org/LEGALLANG/LEGALLANG.HTM
Somashekar, Sandhya and Peyton M. Craighill. “Many Americans confused about health-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/many-americans-
confused-about-health-care-law-poll-finds/2013/09/19/e986346c-2139-11e3-
a358-1144dee636dd_story.html?utm_term=.e5360af1d237
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