2025 Law and Language Workshop: Let linguists teach the drafters: legislation through language

Sir William Dale Centre for Legislative Studies

Debate on legislative expression has long been preserved for the drafting academic and practitioners. But in doing so they have failed the super goal of producing good laws. And they now need to confess that they do not have the answers to everything and collaborate with linguistics to learn from, and borrow, know-how, experience, and resulting successes. 
Indeed, there are inherent difficulties in the drafting of legislation. The drafter is not a mere scribe, and drafting is affected by the environment of the Parliamentary (or legislative) process.
If an instrumental position is taken, the background can be seen to include recognition of a problem, determination of objectives, and the choice of means for their achievement. 

These are the difficult questions confronting lawyers and linguists working both in national and transnational situations. 

The avenues for further research include:

• testing the quality of legislative drafting;
• identifying specific aspects of drafting in the different languages;
• considering how language is used in legislation;
• resolving problems of interpretation in legal documents;
• highlighting how the themes and tools come together in practice through language for  
  effectiveness and legal certainty for language.

Speakers: 

Prof Giulia Pennisi
Prof Constantin Stefanou
Prof Helen Xanthaki   

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