Obscurity And Clarity In The Law

This book explores the intricate and multi-dimensional conception of clarity and obscurity in the law. It presents and examines the most recent research and theories, giving practical guidance on how to avoid obscurity in legal drafting and its impact on legal interpretation. The book is aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seeks to promote an interdisciplinary debate on clarity, law and language, calling for the moving of clarity beyond the study of plain language. The aims of the book are thus two fold. The first is to critically reach a nexus between the disciplines of law and language with respect to the debates on clarity in legal discourse. The second is to achieve an international perspective on the issue, drawing from a wide range of legal and political contexts.

This interdisciplinary collection with contributions in English and French explores how the various disciplines of law and linguistics appreciate and work towards improving the nature of clarity and obscurity in legal language. For the first time, it brings together legal academics and practitioners, jurilinguists and linguists from the common law and civil law with the specific aim to understand the complex nature, practice and tools of clarity and obscurity in legal drafting. Topics addressed include how the Clarity framework has been put into practice through the use of plainer language, better comprehensibility, readability and access to legal or administrative texts. In an attempt to reflect the more recent development of the Clarity-Obscurity debate, the editors have also focused on the use of specific instruments to respond to the problems raised by obscurity to improve clarity. Cette collection interdisciplinaire offrant des contributions en anglais et en français, explore comment les diverses disciplines du droit et de la linguistique appréhendent et visent à perfectionner la nature de la clarté et de l'opacité du discours juridique. Cet ouvrage rassemblant pour la première fois, des universitaires et professionnels du droit, des jurilinguistes et linguistes de la common law and et du droit civil, propose de découvrir la nature complexe, les pratiques et outils de la clarté et de l'opacité utilisés en rédaction juridique. Les questions abordées examinent la mise en pratique de la clarté juridique au travers de l'utilisation de la langue courante, une meilleure lisibilité, compréhensibilité et accès aux textes juridiques et administratifs. Dans le but de refléter l'actualité du débat Clarté-Opacité du discours juridique, les éditrices se sont également concentrées sur l'utilisation des outils et méthodes les plus récents et utilisés pour résoudre les difficultés soulevées par l'opacité des langues du droit et ainsi améliorer la transparence du discours juridique.

This book introduces into the problems of Legal Linguistics. It starts with the most fundamental legal-linguistic question, i.e. how law is created and applied with linguistic means. In breaking down this vast question, the book identifies the linguistically relevant aspects of language use, especially its terminology, and scrutinizes the most significant legal-linguistic operations such as the legal argumentation, the legal interpretation, and the legal translation. Based on case analyses, it canvasses the language use strategies that are most instrumental in the developing of professionally convincing legal argumentation, primarily around terminological units. Towards the background of these and other linguistic operations in law, the book reflects upon some practical problems related to the regulation of language use and the emergence of the global law.

The volume presents a set of invited papers based on analyses of legal discourse drawn from a number of international contexts where often the English language and legal culture has had to adjust to legal concepts very different from those of the English law system. Many of the papers were inspired by two major projects on legal language and inter-multiculturality: Generic Integrity in Legislative Discourse in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts based in Hong Kong and carried out by an international team and Interculturality in Domain-specific English, a national project supported by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research, involving research units from five Italian universities

Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. A History of Ambiguity remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, Anthony Ossa-Richardson explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. A History of Ambiguity lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet’s intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree," then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

This important collection of more than twenty original essays by prominent Kant scholars covers the multiple aspects of Kant’s teaching in relation to his published works. With the Academy edition’s continuing publication of Kant’s lectures, the role of his lecturing activity has been drawing more and more deserved attention. Several of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, logic, ethics, anthropology, theology, and pedagogy have been translated into English, and important studies have appeared in many languages. But why study the lectures? When they are read in light of Kant’s published writings, the lectures offer a new perspective of Kant’s philosophical development, clarify points in the published texts, consider topics there unexamined, and depict the intellectual background in richer detail. And the lectures are often more accessible to readers than the published works. This book discusses all areas of Kant's lecturing activity. Some essays even analyze in detail the content of Kant's courses and the role of textbooks written by key authors such as Baumgarten, helping us understand Kant’s thought in its intellectual and historical contexts. Contributors: Huaping Lu-Adler; Henny Blomme ; Robert Clewis; Alix Cohen; Corey Dyck; Faustino Fabbianelli; Norbert Fischer; Courtney Fugate; Paul Guyer; Robert Louden; Antonio Moretto; Steve Naragon; Christian Onof; Stephen Palmquist; Riccardo Pozzo; Frederick Rauscher; Dennis Schulting; Oliver Sensen; Susan Shell; Werner Stark; John Zammito; Günter Zöller