ABSTRACT
Swiss legislation stands out as a remarkable example of clear legal drafting. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swiss Civil Code was drafted following the principle of “popular law.” Over the last 30 years, different steps have been taken toward drafting even clearer legislation. For example, the concept of clarity was integrated into Swiss law in 2007 (art. 7, Languages Act). To date, however, few empirical studies have been conducted on the quality of Swiss legislation, especially with regard to Italian, which is an official minority and translation language within a trilingual institutional context. This study aims to partially fill this gap. It examines the development of readability of Swiss legislation on a lexical level, as a condition for clarity and therefore one of the indicators of drafting quality. This study will investigate the use of current and modern vocabulary and the occurrence of some archaic connectives from a diachronic perspective. https://LEX.CH.IT" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LEX.CH.IT, a corpus of Swiss federal legislation in Italian covering 1974–2018, was used for various, mostly quantitative, analyses. The results confirm that clarity has always been a feature of Swiss legislation and has been further enhanced by the above-mentioned measures. The Swiss case can therefore be considered an example of best practices.
