ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN LEGAL ARGUMENTATION
ABSTRACT
The language to be utilized as a medium of instruction presents a significant barrier to accessibility for every student or scholar who aspires to study this discipline in the modern era, when legal education is gaining importance as a productive and progressive field of education.
A standardized language founded on logic principles, legal language differs from our everyday language in terms of vocabulary, morphology (formation), semantics, syntax, and other aspects. While maintaining the qualities of a common language, such as intuitive execution, completeness, and lucidity, it seeks to attain consistency and validity. Legal language is essentially the vocabulary used by those who work in the legal field. It is the language that judges, solicitors and writers of legislation use on a daily basis. There are differences, such as legal English and local legal terminology.
KEYWORDS: Language, English, Court, Codified, Drafting
INTRODUCTION
Legal language is a social institution that manifests in both linguistic and non-linguistic forms, it is fundamentally a linguistic institution.
Laws are codified in language, and language mediates legal procedures. The legal system affects many facets of life, from a teacher's duties to a credit card agreement, and it puts into practice a society's views and ideals. As a result, the language of the law is very important, especially for those who work as Applied Linguists, or linguists who handle language concerns and problems in the real world. English is widely recognized as the language that people use to communicate and understand words, actions, and attitudes on a global and international scale. Preschool to graduate-level instruction in this language is provided in all schools and colleges. This is a type of specialized language that has been used by incredibly reliable guys in public for a very long time. However, since it isn't their native tongue, people who live outside of the United States must learn this language[1].
Law is made up of a set of laws as well as procedures for enforcing and challenging those laws. Although the two interact and the line between them is hazy (for example, "precedent" acts as a means of transforming the products of dynamic legal processes into the static basis for interpretation), this difference between the static or codified and the dynamic and dialogic parts of the law is useful. As can still be found in the "traditional law" of orate cultures, this sort of law appears to have evolved as a component of the social control system of human civilizations even before writing.
Law is a spoken profession. It entails having direct contact with individuals and learning about their complex relationships. So, a lawyer needs to be a perfectionist in their use of language. To succeed in his job, a lawyer needs to possess two skills. He should first be able to write clearly and convey himself. To make his intention apparent without any uncertainty or ambiguity, his writing should be concise, unambiguous, and to the point.
To effectively communicate his thoughts and achieve the outcomes he seeks, he must use writing. In addition to written proficiency, he must be effective in oral advocacy. His speech must be basic and understandable to others and should have the power to rally crowds.
Understanding how to use the instruments of the trade, such as law books and other reference materials, is the second skill required for the successful practice of law. A lawyer needs to understand where and how to discover the law.
He must also acquire the necessary reading skills to identify relevant references with the least amount of time and effort wasted. All of them call for a lawyer to have strong linguistic skills.
The requirement that legal terminology be taught in law schools:
Through pedagogical innovation, the culture of teaching legal language can be promoted. Students should be given the chance to analyze the law and form jurisprudential ideas about it rather than only studying its theoretical and fundamental elements. Clinical legal education can be used to accomplish this.
Through university programmes, it is possible to apply a more advanced and useful educational pedagogy and ideology. Legal professionals and law clinicians typically oversee how they're done. With the aid of this pedagogy, pupils may better comprehend legal requirements and how to utilize legal rights and services.
As a result, in order to thrive in the legal profession, one must be aware of the significance of language and make every effort to become knowledgeable, skilled, and verbally proficient.
It should be noted, too, that the legal profession places more emphasis on factual and practical writing than on artistic or creative writing. Legal writing always has a goal; it seeks to produce unmistakable and useful outcomes[2].
However, there can be a lot of drawbacks to using language before the law. The jury chooses the winner based on whose narrative they find to be the most thorough, consistent, and credible. When a witness tells a story, it may cause confusion and give the listeners the impression that the account is illogical if they are from a society with a distinct narrative tradition. A story may be less persuasive or less understandable if the audience does not share the schemas required to comprehend it.
Legal professionals who try to connect with laypeople frequently run into communication problems. Contracts (especially insurance policies), legislation, judges' instructions to juries, and common police cautions or warnings (like the Miranda Warnings in the USA) have all attracted a lot of attention from researchers. Communication issues are crucial, as was recently discovered in Victoria, Australia, when it became clear that cooks did not comprehend food standards. In the scenario presented by Diamond and Levi (1996), wherein jurors failed to properly comprehend instructions concerning mitigating circumstances when determining whether to apply the death penalty, miscommunication poses a life-threatening risk.
ANALYSIS
Acquiring legal terminology is just one aspect of developing legal language; other aspects include developing new ways of thinking, acquiring a new language, and entering a new environment. Legal terminology may be closer to everyday speech and more descriptive than intellectual. There should be more rules developed with regard to the language elements of the development and application of law. It's possible that certain efforts made to modernize legal language won't make them easier to grasp. Legal texts' readability by concentrating on their structure.
In the area of law, improvements and advancements in science and technology have also had a huge impact. As a result, those who work in the legal profession are charged with the important responsibility of investing in their own personal growth and staying current with global events. Since the interaction of translation and correspondence of the law is crucial to transferring the significant elements of the laws to help make arrangements and save lives, information on the law does not end there[3].
Students must first deal with legal documents such case laws, verdicts, statutes, contracts, and by-laws as well as textbooks that contain the legal discourse. These documents are written in formal legalese. Therefore, it will aid in their comprehension if the students are taught the legal language by include it in the Law School curriculum. As the legal profession places a strong emphasis on the words that make up language in the form of rulings and laws. The legal language that is taught in law schools will help the students understand these legal papers more clearly.
CONCLUSION
The ability to communicate in English is important because the majority of people speak it and because people from other countries can now interact with people from other states. It is necessary for two persons to be able to recognize one another's modes of conversation in order to comprehend the laws and standards of others. Lawful practices and laws were first established in the British and American area, and other European and Asian countries eventually imitated and adopted them. As a result, English is the primary language used for writing and correspondence[4].
Globalisation is expanding the realm of law. As a result, having a solid comprehension of legal terminology will open up more prospects for us. Precision and correctness in communication are also crucial. Understanding these ideas and how they are properly expressed in English will improve our ability to compare them to our own system as well as the systems of the parties and those with whom we are in contact, such as a client, a judge, a government official, etc.
REFERENCES [1] https://lawelearning.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/importance-of-language-in-legal-profession/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/law-language/ [3] https://garhwalpost.in/importance-of-legal english/#:~:text=It%20is%20not%20possible%20to,avoid%20any%20ambiguity%20and%20misinterpretation. [4] https://lawelearning.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/importance-of-language-in-legal-profession/
AUTHOR – Shraddha Sharma