The Theory and Practice of Legislation has been publishing research aimed at making a contribution to understanding, interpreting and assessing the quality of legislation. Many special issues have been dedicated to the examination of legislation, both at national and international levels. To this day good quality legislation has remained most relevant, against a background of multi-level governance, persistent crises in which legislation is enacted at a faster pace than ever before, and common accusations of a larger gap between citizenry and governments. It is against this background that we propose to the readers a special issue focusing on the clarity, transparency and legitimacy in rule-making with a special attention to legal language.
Good quality legal language is a precondition for obtaining compliance from addressees and increasing comprehensibility by citizens. Understanding what is required and what can be expected of legal language in different rule-making contexts is, in turn, a fraught terrain which requires both empirical and normative awareness. Yet the legal language of national and international legislation and regulation, alongside court rulings, remains an under-appreciated commodity, which is more often than not abused or even completely ignored, rather than problematised and improved. From a scholarly perspective, understanding legal language with an eye to connecting (normative and linguistic) clarity with substantive transparency (towards embodied users) and their relevance to legitimacy can generate important knowledge about the functioning of legal institutions. From a practical perspective, legal language is the litmus test for legislators and regulators in order to convince their addressees of the acceptability of their proposals.
This special issue highlights two main messages emerging through a set of diverse contributions: first, legal language is a multi-faceted problem including matters of argumentation and persuasion, comprehensibility, ethics, transparency, and accountability; second, all these dimensions can only be addressed when seeing legal language in the context of its underlying normative goals, which cannot be reduced to compliance. These points emerge clearly from the articles in this issue in which scholars and practitioners of law reflect on the problems and potential solutions for improving legislation, regulation, legally non-binding instruments, legal rulings and machine-based legal decisions. As all studies demonstrate, legal language should be a fundamental issue of concern with serious consequences in the long-term affecting rule of law, legitimacy and ultimately citizens.
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