Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

All laws to be written in plain English?

Harriet Harman’s campaign against ‘lawyer-speak’

issue 17 June 2006

Harriet Harman’s campaign against ‘lawyer-speak’

Harriet Harman has got herself back in the news by doing something rather good. She is the minister for constitutional affairs and last week introduced legislation which is more notable for the way in which it is drafted than for the change to the law it effects.

The Bill in question is quite remarkable, for it is written in something called ‘plain English’, which is what we all used to speak before the lawyers somehow attained their total cultural, political and linguistic hegemony over the rest of us at some point towards the end of the last century. Actually, the Bill is written in two languages: there’s that hideous, ubiquitous thing, lawyer-speak, on one side of the page and a translation into ‘plain English’ on the other side. You may be inclined to ask, why bother with the lawyer-speak at all, if the Bill already exists, de facto, in a language all of us can understand.

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