If I could glimpse a jurist of the future, she would master topics that until recently lay beyond our horizon. Most of us already understand, or should understand, the importance of cybersecurity and data management. Some of us use AI tools and are learning both how to trust their outputs and how to identify their limitations. We may not even agree on whether the current level of regulatory complexity is desirable, but we do recognise that law, like legal practice itself, cannot sit still while the world moves. As Lord Denning famously said in Packer v. Packer (1953), “If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere”.
Yet for all these advances, the way we write may remain much the same. Legal writing is still often verbose, abstract, excessively formal, archaic, jargon-ridden, and reliant on Latin expressions that most citizens cannot understand. We prepare for the future while carrying forward writing habits we rarely question, and whose criticism we often take more personally than we would like to admit. This persists despite an extensive body of literature on the practical aspects of good writing, and despite many book-length discussions on how to achieve clear communication in different legal contexts.
Let us face it: few surpass jurists in the art of ornamenting language.
The difference is that ours is, in large part, a craft of writing, and yet we are rarely trained to write clearly. As students, we learn from books filled with formalisms, archaisms, and Latinisms, and we attempt to reproduce that style in exams. We internalise these habits before we are even encouraged to question them. We then carry them into practice: judges into the reasoning of their decisions, lawyers into their pleadings, and those in alternative legal careers into their written communication. In doing so, we sustain a long-standing tradition of poor legal writing.
The problem is not specialised legal language itself. Technical terms such as usucapion (or acquisitiveprescription), appellee, or defendant serve important functions. Ordinary words used in specialised senses, such as actionfor lawsuit or instrument for legal document, are also not the main source of the difficulty. Even some Latin expressions, such as in dubio pro reo and habeas corpus, express ideas that would otherwise require longer and more cumbersome explanations. The problem, rather, is the strong tendency of legal language, as David Mellinkoff argues in The Language of the Law (1963), to become wordy, unclear, pompous, and dull.
Of course, different legal genres present different drafting challenges. Legislative drafters, for example, must anticipate the many circumstances to which their words might apply, as well as the possible misinterpretations readers might place upon them. In that respect, they face greater pressure than most other writers to prioritise precision. But the need for precision does not require legislative drafting to be unnecessarily verbose or difficult to follow. Even legislation can be written more clearly.
Consider, for example, recital (176) of one of the EU’s most forward-looking instruments, the AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689):
“Since the objective of this Regulation, namely to improve the functioning of the internal market and to promote the uptake of human centric and trustworthy AI, while ensuring a high level of protection of health, safety, fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, including democracy, the rule of law and environmental protection against harmful effects of AI systems in the Union and supporting innovation, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the action, be better achieved at Union level, the Union may adopt measures in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 TEU. In accordance with the principle of proportionality as set out in that Article, this Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary in order to achieve that objective.”
Compare it with the following reformulation:
“Member States cannot sufficiently achieve the objective of this Regulation referred to in recital (1), whereas the Union can better achieve it because of the scale and effects involved. The Union may therefore adopt measures in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity set out in Article 5 TEU. In accordance with the principle of proportionality set out in that Article, this Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve that objective.”
The reformulation is 64 words shorter and arguably easier to follow on first reading. The objectives of the Regulation are no longer redundantly restated. It avoids a long sentence containing multiple embedded clauses and instead relies on shorter formulations. It also privileges the active voice, making agents perform actions rather than presenting the subject as undergoing them, thereby reducing abstraction. What may appear to be a modest improvement could matter considerably if replicated, where appropriate, throughout the Regulation.
None of this is to suggest that clear writing is easy. The reformulation itself could be improved, as could this text. Clearer texts are often harder to write than less clear ones and therefore require training and time, both of which jurists often lack. Yet the fact that clarity demands more of us is no reason to leave it to chance. If progress does not follow from the mere passage of time, and writing is central to our craft, then we should not only care more about the clarity of legal writing, but also train jurists to write clearly.
