The ‘Legalese’
Law is the most powerful thing in the world that can create major impact on various factors. Spanned over multiple cultures of India, interesting to know, these Indian laws are considered the most complicated system. However, apart from advocates, lawyers and people who understand the legal language, the common man is still unaware of many laws in India. The first and foremost problem regarding this concern is hard legal language. This article pronounces the problems faced due to complex legal language and its solutions.
What is ‘Legalese’ (Legal Language)?
‘Legalese’ is legal language—specifically constructed for legal purposes, and used in various legal documents, contracts, laws, and court proceedings. This legalese is specifically designed to have precision, clarity and consistency, however, it creates barriers for average people. As mentioned above, a diverse-cultured country like India often faces issues such as the difficulty in comprehending legal language.
For legal documents to remain unambiguous and be able to combat future scrutiny, legal language uses special vocabulary, long-complex sentences and most words and terms from Latin and archaic. However, for laypeople, it becomes difficult to access and scrutinise the information. Moreover, due to the influence of foreign languages and the British era, people who are not familiar with the legal language, often stay away from the world of law and order.
Legal Terminology AKA Terms of Art
India’s legal regime is replete with terms and phrases, both oral and written, that bear peculiar and unique connotations within the legal domain and differ from general parlance. In contract law, “consideration” means something of value a party to a contract receives as a basis for entering into a contract; in regular usage, it means “thoughtfulness.” Hence, it needs special knowledge to understand legal documents which creates breaches between legal professionals and common people.
Vagueness and Interpretation
Furthermore, the rules of law themselves are vague in nature or open to interpretation in various matters. This creates a number of complexities and misunderstandings due to the vagueness of the resultant. Moreover, the translations between languages in the multilingual context of India compound the anaphoric difficulties in the text.
For instance, any English legal terminology might not have a corresponding Hindi or regional lingo interpretation. This has the effect of creating interpretive differences that fuel legal controversies and confusion among the public enhancing difficulties of legal issues to common persons.
Therefore, under the current structure, there occur barriers in the form of professional language compounded by convoluted text which floods India’s legal domain; thereby establishing an effective demarcation of the legal profession from the people it serves. Technologies that help people overcome the shelter of legal jargon and language barriers could bring justice and more openness.
What Can We Do to Address this Problem?
An idea for change in the Indian context is to alter what is written on legal papers. This may refer to current laws and rules and rewrite them in simpler language that everybody can understand. For example, some places have introduced plain language in writing legislation to the effect that legal documents must be written in simple, plain language.
- Simple Language Efforts
Justification of simple language efforts entails attempts to ease the complexity of legal papers and common messages by substituting cumbersome language with plain, easily understandable statements. Such endeavours can be used for all manner of legal writings, such as contracts, forms and legal notices.
For example, a contract that can be understood easily would have simple structured small sentences, no legal terms mentioned in related documents and clearly defining everyone’s responsibilities and privileges.
- Legal Education to Common People
If both legal language and the formulation of legal knowledge itself are part of the problem, then more effective ways of teaching law and getting people to understand it are another part of the solution. This includes not only programs for the formation of new lawyers and judges but also programs for the improvement of the population’s primary legal literacy.
For instance, legal aid organizations, operating in India as an example, can conduct sessions or provide education material to enable people to understand some legal terms and concepts. Many people might also partake in educating the community about law by incorporating basic law into what schools teach in and even in community centres.
Conclusion
Issues with the legal English phrases evident in India are monumental and affect people’s endeavours to seek justice in many ways. The legal systems are devised in such a manner that the laws passed by the government are highly complex and people are not able to understand the rights which are accredited to them. This can make sense of making exclusion from the legal process.
To address these problems, genuine efforts are expected from lawyers, policy markers and teachers. By making legal language simpler, insisting on plain and clear legal language and raising peoples’ legal literacy, India can make law simpler and can provide justice to the people. Law must therefore not be the domain of a subset of the population in this diverse and democratic nation we call India.
