Chapter below, but for the moment it is necessary to focus attention on a difficulty that is shared by both common law and statute law and which permits scope for such judicial creativity. Legal sources, whether previous cases or statutes, do not simply speak for themselves. They have to be actively created through interpretation. A key attribute of language is its essential fluidity; words can have more than one meaning and the particular meaning to be attributed to a word depends on the context in which it is used. Law suffers from the general difficulties inherent in making sense of any linguistic communication, but it also suffers from the particular problem of what some have described as deliberate obscurantism and poor drafting. In Chapter of Bernard Jackson's Making Sense in Law (footnotes omitted), he considers the problems that arise in relation to legal language. Making Sense in Law,

doi:10.4324/9781843143451-15

Chapter

Chapter below, but for the moment it is necessary to focus attention on a difficulty that is shared by both common law and statute law and which permits scope for such judicial creativity. Legal sources, whether previous cases or statutes, do not simply speak for themselves. They have to be actively created through interpretation. A key attribute of language is its essential fluidity; words can have more than one meaning and the particular meaning to be attributed to a word depends on the context in which it is used. Law suffers from the general difficulties inherent in making sense of any linguistic communication, but it also suffers from the particular problem of what some have described as deliberate obscurantism and poor drafting. In Chapter of Bernard Jackson's Making Sense in Law (footnotes omitted), he considers the problems that arise in relation to legal language. Making Sense in Law,

ABSTRACT

Dimensions of legal languages Where law is expressed in writing, we must expect it to display the characteristics of the written word (as opposed to speech) in addition to features particular to legal writing. It will not be constrained by the limits of memory in processing speech, and so will tolerate more lists than would speech. It will be more 'autoglottic' and less dependent for its meaning upon the context in which it is known to have originated. Because of the possibility of 'backward scanning', greater complexity and precision may be sought than is possible in speech, or at least in a more concise form than is possible in intelligible speech.