The factor of target audience of a legislative text and its influence on the language of law

The paper considers the relationship between the factor of target audience of a legislative text and the linguistic features of a law. The target audience of British statutes has changed through history. From the XV century to the 1970s drafters meant statutes to be read by professionals, i.e. lawyers and judges. This influenced the style of drafting. The sentences were long and often consisted of hundreds of words. Drafters used complex syntactic structures with numerous clauses and participial constructions. The key modal verb was shall. It was used both to express the duty to do something and to state facts. Statutes were abundant in archaic words, references, nominal phrases and technical words. All this made legislative texts extremely hard to understand and an ordinary person had to consult a lawyer in order to know what a particular law said. Criticism of the language of law gained momentum in the 1970s. Renton Committee Report of 1975 emphasised that if citizens do not understand laws they are deprived of their right to live under the rule of law, which undermines democracy. Plain English Movement, which also became popular in Britain in the 1970s, contributed a lot to further changes in the language of law. Plain English drafters assumed that the reader of a legal document is the user of the document. That is why laws should be written in plain language, i.e. clear and precise language. The language of law really changed under the influence of the Movement. One of the most noticeable trends was that drafters stopped using shall and replaced it with must to express duties and obligations and Present Simple to state the provisions. Passive voice was preserved mainly for gender-neutral writing and in repeals and amendments. Most archaic words such as forthwith, hereby, notwithstanding, aforesaid, here inafter, thereunder stopped to be used. Plain English drafters promoted the use of short sense-bites, which led to changes in syntax and the layout of a section. In 2012 a research was conducted in Britain to find out who the readers of statutes are. The research singled out three groups of readers: no-lawyers who use legislation in their work, members of public who want to know and protect their rights and lawyers ranging from practicing lawyers to law librarians. Thus, the target audience of a legislative text is not homogeneous. The research also showed that both lawyers and non-lawyers have difficulties in understanding statutes. As a result British government launched a project called good law initiative meaning that good law is necessary, clear, coherent, effective and accessible. The research revealed which drafting techniques work better for the reader and which are absolutely ineffective. A new Drafting Guidance was presented in 2015, which gave practical recommendations to the drafters on how to draft laws and improve their language. Thus drafters were recommended to avoid sandwich clauses, to avoid using references within one section, to replace certain formal words like pursuant to, by virtue of, without prejudice to the generality of with simpler and more understandable equivalents, etc. The paper concludes that the target audience of a legislative text is different. The drafter needs to strike the right balance between lawyers and non-lawyers choosing the appropriate linguistic means carefully.