A comprehensive guide to legal style and usage, with practical advice on how to write clear, jargon-free legal prose. Includes style tips as well as definitions.

A comprehensive guide to legal style and usage, with practical advice on how to write clear, jargon-free legal prose. Includes style tips as well as definitions.

Since the 1987 appearance of A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, Bryan A. Garner has proved to be a versatile and prolific writer on legal-linguistic subjects. This collection of his essays shows both profound scholarship and sharp wit. The essays cover subjects as wide-ranging as learning to write, style, persuasion, contractual and legislative drafting, grammar, lexicography, writing in law school, writing in law practice, judicial writing, and all the literature relating to these diverse subjects.

This study concentrates on three major issues creating a basis for the making of the "Czech-English Law Dictionary with Explanations", namely language, including terminology, in both the Czech and Anglo-American systems of law; the process of legal translation; and the lexicographic method of producing a bilingual law dictionary. Terminology has been considered the most significant feature of language for legal purposes. It encompasses a wide range of special-purpose vocabulary and higher syntactic units, including legal jargon. Conceptual analysis is to be pursued whenever an identical term in the target language does not exist or its full equivalent is in doubt. Legal translation should be based primarily on comparative legal, linguistic and genre analysis in order to make the transfer of legal information as precise, accurate and comprehensible as possible. The primary objective of legal translation is for the target recipient to be provided as explicit, extensive and precise legal information in the target language as is contained in the source text, complemented (by the translator) with facts rendering the original information fully comprehensible in the different legal environment and culture. A dictionary which will help its users to produce legal texts in the target language should be founded upon a profound comparative legal and linguistic analysis that will (a) determine equivalents at the levels of vocabulary, syntax and genre, (b) select the appropriate lexicographic material to be included in the dictionary, and (c) create entries in a user-friendly manner.

Edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, the Foundations in Language and Law series aims beyond the traditional surveys of scholarship in law and language. Monographs in the series will provide foundational materials - theoretical, methodological, critical, practical - to advance study of important topics in the field. And even as each volume engages conceptually with current scholarship in the area, it presents original research which breaks new ground and indicates future directions for scholarship in law and language. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.

This book is a must-have for anyone interested in language translation. It is a valuable tool for those looking to embark on a translation career and those already in the field. Faculty members teaching translation courses, current and graduate students and translation business owners will undoubtedly find this book to be an indispensable resource. It serves as a guide and reference material for the language professionals seeking to hone their skills, sell their services, generate more revenues, equip themselves with the tools necessary to ultimately excel in the field. It contains a wealth of information and reference on how to develop a translation career. If you are interested in entering the field and do not know how to start, you will most certainly find your answer in this book. The book also covers everything from preparing your resume, preparing your business cards, working as a freelance translator, as an in-house translator, for an International Organization or for the Federal Government, to running your own translation business. It also arms you with information on how to market your services, how to beware of Internet Scams targetted at professional translators and interpreters, how to address payment issues, among other things. This book even covers the legal aspect involved in language translation. Towards the end section of the book, the reader will be able to refer to a concise glossary as well as to a list of International Organizations hiring language professionals, a list of Translation and Interpretation Schools in the United States and Abroad, and also to a list of Professional Translation and Interpretation Organizations in the United States and Abroad. This compilation of years of experience and research by the author will provide the reader with the materials, tools and resources that will contribute to a successful career in language translation.

This clearly structured and well-referenced book shows how and why traditional legal language has developed some of the peculiar characteristics that sometimes make legal documents inaccessible to the end users. It examines recent reforms in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and provides a critical examination of case law and the rules of interpretation. Practical elements are also covered. Detailed case studies illustrate how obtuse words and phrases can be reworked or removed. Particularly useful is the step-by-step guide to drafting in the modern style, using examples drawn from four types of legal documents: leases, company constitutions, wills and conveyances. Readers of this book will receive clear instructions on how to make their writing clearer and their legal documents more useful to clients and colleagues. This book will benefit all law students and professionals.

This revised edition of Legal Research and Law Library Management retains the best elements of the previous edition while covering the latest in law library management.

Complementing other studies on judicial discourse, this book investigates previously unexplored areas, focusing on the realisation of Concession in the genre of judgment. In addition to providing a review of approaches to concessivity as well as legal and linguistic perspectives on argumentation, the analysis draws on genre studies and follows a genre-based view of legal language. It shows the way in which the Concessive relation is deployed by last-instance courts, as revealed by an examination of EU and Polish judgments. In what constitutes a pioneering attempt to identify tripartite Concessive patterns in written data, the author breaks away from the traditional view of written legal discourse seen as static and monologic communication. Instead, she offers insights into the linguistic construction of judicial argumentation, seen as a “mute dialogue” with the addressee, highlighting recurrent argumentative schemata and related discourse signals and functions. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the analysis demonstrates that the dialogic model of Concession, designed as a tool for an examination of talk-in-interaction, can be successfully applied in an investigation of written data. The book is aimed at students and researchers with interests in legal discourse, genre analysis and argumentation studies.

As lawyers, we must not, in hot pursuit of common law, outrun common sense. The dread of that eventuality prompted this book. Learned Writing promotes common sense in legal language. Plain language, which is commonsensical, broadens access to legal documents, thus democratizing the law. If democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people, law is the language in which government interacts with the people—it is the language of democracy. The people whose government speaks through law must understand what is said. No democratic society should brook legalese, a dense, verbose dialect known only to lawyers. What then should society do to redress the lawyer-induced obscurity? A Shakespearean character had an alarming proposal: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Apparently, that proposal was not enthusiastically endorsed, which explains why we’re still here. A milder remedy—enrolling lawyers in language classes—has been muted, which explains why this book is in your hands. Learned Writing motivates lawyers to prefer plain language to the legalese and verbosity that have besmirched legal writing for centuries. This book is as sweeping a treatment of its subject as you can find anywhere.