Legislation and Language Project - Announcements
The aim of the Legislation and Language Project is to start a co-operation between Linguists and Legislative Drafters in terms of the analysis of the drafting aspects of language and the discussion of their use in legislation.
For this reason, the Legislation and Language Project aims at gathering scholars and researchers who are interested in the field of law and language to share their knowledge and expertise. In this regard, it becomes crucial to see how Linguists and Legislative Drafters may cooperate in order to have a better legislation. Among the themes that will be explored, particular relevance will be given to the structure of legislation in terms of the lexico-grammatical and discoursal features and the extent to which its goals can be better achieved.
The papers from the first workshop in the Legislation and Language Project are to be published in Theory and Practice of Legislation later this year but already one of those papers by an Associate Research Fellow at the IALS has been quoted by the EU Ombudsman in a talk in London on 15 May: https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/speech/en/54331
It has also been extensively referred to in an article in the Financial Times of 22 May:
https://catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/record=b3542028~S6.
Clearly the Legislation and Language Project is of interest not just to academics but to a much wider audience.
In order to put forward the research agenda, Professor Xanthaki and Dr. Pennisi are organizing a Seminar on "Clarification and easification of legislative drafting" that will be hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies on 25 March 2015. This Seminar is in association with Clarity, the International Association for Plain Legal Language.