Decoding Legal Texts: A Look at Some Syntactic Features of Legal Texts
Decoding Legal Texts: A Look at Some Syntactic Features of Legal Texts

Summary/Abstract: Characterised by an intricate structure, legal texts often challenge the non-specialist’s power of comprehension and frustrates the untrained reader. The convoluted sentence construction of legal texts renders them opaque to the lay reader and frequently turns into an obstacle between the nonprofessional people and their legal needs. In our contentious society, legal awareness has become a necessary skill that individuals should be trained to develop in order to understand and respect their rights and responsibilities as members of a community. Legal awareness may be approached from various angles, including the linguistic one. Be it part of a law article, a paragraph in a contract or a paragraph in a court decision, the sentence of a legal text is the first step taken by a nonprofessional reader in trying to understand a legal document. Knowledge and understanding of the structure of a legal sentence help the untrained individual follow that text from the very beginning to the very end without feeling as if he or she were lost in a maze. The literature offers suggestions for “slicing up” a legal text in order to reveal the logic behind its elaborate sentence structure.

• Details
• Contents