2. Legal language is the type of language used by
lawyers and other legal professionals in the
course of their work.
Spoken language is just as indispensable to the
legal process.The legal implications of the
language continue to extend far beyond the
court room to interaction between police and
suspects, to conversation between lawyers and
their clients , etc.A little reflection is enough to
notice how essential language is to the legal
interprise.
3. To know how this special dialect came about
and how it differs from ordinary English;
researchers have turned to the language of
the law as linguistic phenomenon in its right.
First scholarly publications about law and
language was David Mellinkoff’s monumental
work,The Language of the Law, published in
1963.
4. The study of the language of legal texts encompasses a wide
range of forensic texts.That includes the study of text types and
forms of analysis.
Any text or item of spoken language can potentially be a forensic
text when it is used in a legal or criminal context.[2]This includes
analyzing the linguistics of documents as diverse as Acts of
Parliament (or other law-making body), private wills, court
judgments' and summonses and the statutes of other bodies,
such as States and government departments. One important area
is that of the transformative effect of Norman French and
Ecclesiastic Latin on the development of the English common law,
and the evolution of the legal specifics associated with it. It can
also refer to the ongoing attempts at making legal language more
comprehensible to laypeople
5. One part of the language of legal texts
encompasses the Miranda warning in the United
States.These warnings let the defendant know
that they have the right to be silent since
whatever they say from the point they are in
police custody can and will be used against them
in a court of law.
The recipients who are advised of these rights
must have a certain level of competency in the
English language in order to completely
understand the warning.[10]
6. Tiersma (2001: 75) notes that in Anglo-Saxon times legal language
was entirely oral, with written text, when it eventually came to be
used, serving at first only as a record of what had already been
performed orally.
At first, French was the language of the courts, though from very
early on there were concessions to the fact that the language of
the majority of the population was English. One surviving
lexicogrammatical consequence of the two languages working
side by side is the frequent use of binomials; that is, pairs of
originally synonymous words taken from the two languages like
devise and bequeath, breaking and entering, acknowledge and
confess, null and void. Indeed, binomials are up to five times more
frequent in English legal language than in most other prose
genres. For centuries the law worked with a strange mixture of the
two languages, nicely exemplified from this extract from a case
report written by Mr Justice Hutton Legge in 1631.
7. Gradually, the English language drove out the
French and by the sixteenth century the
number of French legal terms in active use
had shrunk to under a thousand (Tiersma
1999: 32). However, it was not until 1650 that
Parliament passed a law requiring that all
case reports and law books should be in ‘the
English.
8. Manslaughter:The unlawful killing of one human
by another without express or implied intent to
do injury.
Legislature: An officially elected or selected
body of people vested with responsibility and
power to make laws for a political unit, such as a
state or nation.
Prosecution attorney: A lawyer empowered to
prosecute cases on behalf of a government and
its people. Also called prosecution, prosecuter.
9. The language of the law, published in 1963,
nearly two decades before linguists would
turn to legal language, written by David
Mellinkoff’s.
It is full of 6 wordiness, redundancy, and
specialized vocabulary and it often contains
lengthy, complex, and unusual sentence
structure.
