Why Legal English Sounds So Strange

Anyone who has tried to read a lease, a will or the small print of an insurance policy will have noticed that legal English is not quite the English spoken anywhere else. It is a language in which people do not stop but cease and desist, in which a contract is not merely canceled but declared null and void, and in which the parties hereinafter referred to as the tenant are forbidden from doing things they had never dreamed of doing. Much of this strangeness is not deliberate obscurity, or not only. It is history, preserved in the language like insects in amber.

The story begins in 1066. After the Norman Conquest, the new ruling class spoke a form of French, while the written business of government and the Church was largely conducted in Latin. English survived as the language of ordinary people, but for several centuries it was very much the junior partner. In the courts, a specialized variety known as Law French developed, and it proved remarkably durable. In 1362 Parliament passed a statute requiring court proceedings to be pleaded in English, on the grounds that litigants could not understand what was being said about them. With a certain irony, the statute itself was written in French, and lawyers went on writing their notes and law reports in Law French well into the seventeenth century. Latin, meanwhile, remained the language of official court records until the 1730s.

The legacy is everywhere. Attorney, bailiff, plaintiff, defendant, verdict and jury all reached English through French, as did mortgage, whose French roots mean, quite literally, a dead pledge. Law French also left its mark on word order. In phrases such as attorney general, court martial and fee simple, the adjective follows the noun, just as it would in French or Spanish, and a Spanish speaker who finds these phrases oddly familiar is not imagining things.

Latin has proved even harder to dislodge. Lawyers still speak of habeas corpus, the principle that a detained person must be brought before a court; of mens rea, the guilty mind that most crimes require; of prima facie evidence, which is sufficient unless it is contradicted; and of work done pro bono, for the public good and without a fee. The ancient warning caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, is still quoted, although modern consumer law has considerably weakened it.

Then there are the doublets and triplets: null and void, cease and desist, fit and proper, give, devise and bequeath. One popular explanation holds that in a bilingual legal system it was prudent to pair an English word with its French or Latin equivalent, so that every reader would understand at least one of them. Will and testament is often cited as an example, combining an English word with one of Latin origin. Other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that many doublets are made of two words from the same language, and that pairing words was also simply a habit of formal style. A less flattering theory, which is difficult to prove, notes that clerks were at times paid according to the length of the documents they produced.

Whatever their origins, these habits have attracted growing criticism. From the 1970s onwards, the Plain English movement argued that documents which ordinary people must sign should be written in language ordinary people can read. In Britain, the Plain English Campaign was founded in 1979; in the United States, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 required federal agencies to communicate clearly with the public. In England and Wales, reforms to civil procedure in 1999 even replaced the venerable plaintiff with the plainer claimant.

Lawyers who resist such changes are not always merely being conservative. Some traditional phrases have been interpreted by courts for centuries, and their meaning is, as a result, unusually precise; replacing them with everyday words can create fresh uncertainty. The real challenge, then, is not to abolish legal English but to distinguish between the terms that do genuine work and the ones that survive only because nobody has dared to remove them.