ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with an initial distinction between court judgments and law reports in the UK. This is followed by a brief discussion of how civil law judgments differ from common law judgments. There is then an examination of the two corpora that have been compiled of judgments from the Civil and Criminal Courts of Appeal of England and Wales, the first based on cases from the 1970s, the second on cases decided in 2020. After outlining the criteria adopted in order to see whether or not recent judgments have absorbed the principles of plain language, there is a detailed analysis of the results of the investigation. The conclusion is that in some respects modern court judgments are less user-friendly they used to be, certainly in terms of the excessive length of contemporary judgments, especially in civil cases, whereas in other aspects improvements can be seen, for example in terms of linguistic “democratisation,” where the distance between “us” (the judicial profession) and “them” (the reader) has been reduced.
