Legal Language

By Peter M. Tiersma

Book Overview

Statutes, judicial opinions, contracts, deeds, and wills profoundly affect our daily lives, but their language tends to be often nearly impossible to understand. In this lively history of legal language, Peter Tiersma slices through the thicket of legalese, explaining where it comes from, why lawyers continue to cling to it, and why it's doesn't have to be an inevitable feature of our legal system.

"Legal Language will resonate with lawyers . . . and any non-lawyer who has waded through legal documents, or has tuned in to the latest trial on Court TV."--Carmie D. Boccuzzi, Jr., Boston Book Review

" A] masterful, highly readable, and enjoyable book. . . . Legal Language is truly a fun book to read."--David Schultz, Law and Politics Book Review

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226803023
• ISBN13: 9780226803029
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A thoughtful, linguistic perspective on legal language.

I'm a teacher of legal writing, and I want all my students to read this book--and every lawyer, too. It offers insights into legal language that I have not seen anywhere else: how lawyers use language to set themselves apart; how statutes employ archaisms to present an air of authority; how jury instructions confuse jurors.It also presents the many reasons that legal language came to be the way it is, while avoiding simplistic explanations. And though it discusses many ways that legal language fails us, it gives just as many ways to improve it.Most important, the book takes legal language seriously, calling it a "sublanguage" of English and "a set of linguistic features that are superimposed on everyday speech." At the same time, it recognizes that lawyers who care about communicating will have to make difficult decisions about what parts of legal language to keep and what parts to abandon.

wonderful demystification of the club

Mr. Tiersma's book is a wonderful shibboleth into the miasmatic and confusing world of the legal lexicon. A superlative source for clear prose. Wait, I thought that it was lawyers who used confusing language.