 
                        20070527.00

     The language of lawmakers, judges, and litigants, the
language of lawyers and of the law belongs in a category of
its own.  Natural language seeks to establish and confirm
sympathy.  But legal language, being unnatural, is
calculated to express, foster and buttress antipathy.  In
natural language the hearer makes an effort to understand,
complementing the speakers attempts to voice his thoughts
and feelings, saying in effect, "Even if I do not
understand your words, I understand what you mean; I
understand what you are trying to say."  In the discourse
of the law, one does just the opposite, one deliberately
misconstrues, deliberately refuses to (try to) understand
what the speaker means. Hence the redundancy of legal
discourse, hence the "boiler plate" of legal documents. The
refusal to understand is, moreover, a self-fullfilling
process.  In the end, the speaker and the hearer insist
that words and phrases have different and incompatible
meanings.  Then communication breaks down, and the scheme
of rules, regulations and laws becomes an impenetrable
verbal jungle. Historically, common law pleading and code
pleading illustrate the circumstance that communication in
bad faith leads to a Tower of Babel.  So do contemporary
tax laws and regulations.

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Copyright 2007, Ernst Jochen Meyer
