I would like to enter this friendly fray in defense of legalese.
Rebecca Wheeler makes an excellent point about the audience.
I would like to extend those comments to include the purpose for
writing and the weaknesses of ordinary language.
 
The purpose of legal language is to specify unambiguously what must
or must not be done.  In reading 'ordinary prose' we are content to allow
the context to provide clues to the meaning of individual
sentences.  In reading great literature, we expect writers to
communicate more indirectly, making us rely on a very wide context.
However, to make the interpretation of legal documents depend on the
context (even in the narrow, textual sense of 'context') would be
disasterous for our society, and could lead to despotism.
[Look at how upset some people get at Supreme Court decisions based
on certain 'loose interpretations' of the Constitution.]  In short, legal
language must be as unambiguous as possible.
 
Now, that is just one of the greatest weaknesses of human language:
it is hopelessly ambiguous.   Ambiguity is one of those things that make
language so useful for us (cf. the comments of French sociologist
Jacques Ellul in _The Humiliation of the Word_--chapter one).
The attempt to eliminate ambiguity is what makes legal language so tedious.
Linguist William O'Grady writes: "It's surprisingly easy to write an
article in which every sentence is ambiguous.  It's much harder--maybe
even impossible--to write one that isn't ambiguous, or to write anything
that isn't ambiguous.  Maybe this explains why...our court system is so
clogged (obstructed, that is, not filled with Dutch wooden shoes)...."
[Contemporary Linguistics, 3rd ed.].
 
We taxpayers and citizens love to have loopholes for people
like us.  We would like to have those ambiguities removed that provide
loopholes for "them" to take "unfair advantage of."   My advice
for instructing lawyers about English usage is that when their
audience is the 'general public' and their purpose is to inform the public
about legal matters, they need to monitor the language
they are using with the public: without being too tedious, try not to
mislead us with ambiguous statements. [They could practice by doing
'translation exercises'--from legalese to public language--but, of course,
they would 'lose something in the translation.'  Can
they identify what they have lost?]   However, when lawyers write
those laws, they should hone the ability to close loopholes with
unambiguous,  tedious language--an unnatural creature, to be sure,
but a necessary evil.
 
 
 
 
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R. Michael Medley       VPH 211                Ph: (712) 737-7047
Assistant Professor     Northwestern College
Department of English   Orange City, IA  51041
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