I wish to address in this brief article, the relation between a certain form of language and the law, and the eventual necessity in adopting only a said form over others.
The applicability, extent, stringency and flexibility of a legislation depends on the type and nature of combinations of words that substantially and visually constitute it. No one perhaps will agree more on the necessity of using only a certain word in only a certain place to convey only a certain meaning. What scalpels and forceps are to a surgeon, words are to a lawyer. The substance of a law is indisputably to be found in the intent of the legislature enacting it, but the intent itself is the ore that deeply, not so evenly, fills the earth of the words. It is the exhumation and refinement of this ore that bears on this article’s topic. After all, what is the judicial and perhaps at the Bar, the labour that goes into interpreting a provision, if not the ideological and the linguistic surgery of a provision, and all while it remains (unlike on a surgeon’s table) undrowsied, while it remains as lively and fervent as it does while in action and at play?
This is my proposition, that ‘it is not only expedient but essential to ‘continue to use a certain type of semantic and syntax, in the legislative language, of judicial pronouncements etc, that is not commonly used when in the general public use’. This I insist (with no prejudice to its parsability and comprehension) because there are no multiple combinations or sets of words, differently constituted, that convey the exact same meaning. No two words are exact synonyms of each other. No two usages can have an indistinguishable, identical import. The absolute necessity, more than the convenience, to use a characteristic semantic in the legal language stems from the absolute necessity to convey and to cause to have an import, only that which is conceived. Of only, and only that which forms the content of the intent. Infrequent resorts even to the contrary, then can have the dangerous effect of diluting the import and efficiency of conveying the actual substance of that which is sought to be conveyed.
It must be understood once and for all, that the characteristic use of language is not an artificially created practice of a select few individuals that practice the law for the alleged satisfaction of their sinister interests. Rather, the fact of the matter is that the language has had a characteristic growth in the unintended crevices and the deliberate vaults of legal thought so as to aptly express and bring to life what otherwise would’ve remained mere abstractions.
Addressing the same question, Justice Cardozo in his piece ‘Law and Literature’ had stated “Form is not something added to substance as a protuberant adornment. The two are fused into a unity. ... form alone takes and holds and preserves substance, saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in.”