Everyone I know would describe the law as a corporate jargon for the means of prosecuting criminals. A list of complicated words that mean something to some people. In my opinion, this isn’t how it should be. Law should be accessible and the legal system should be much less complicated and drawn out than we currently view it as. However, making the law more accessible isn’t just a simple matter, as there are many changes to be made. This is what we are going to be exploring. How do we make the law and legal system more accessible to the general public? What are the problems with the system and can we put initiatives in place towards solving them?

The Language

Everyone knows that the law is complicated. But not many people know why the law handbooks and official documents use this kind of language, when we have simpler words in the common era. This type of language has been unofficially dubbed “legalese” (which I will continue to use to refer to this type of language) and has been preserved throughout many years for many different reasons. One of these reasons is simply just precision, the language has been used previously and remains to connote the same thing it did all those years ago. Furthermore, this language has to be precise to make sure that criminals do not utilise legal loopholes. For example, a famous legal loophole that was phased out in the past decade (2010s) was the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” loophole. This featured giant tech companies like Google and Apple routing profits through Irish subsidiaries (smaller companies that are at least 50% owned or controlled by a large one), one of which was managed by Bermuda, a tax haven, to put it simply. This made it so that the companies in the US avoided the corporate tax they would usually have to pay on non-US profited goods. Fortunately, this did get phased out as Ireland abolished the profit-routing scheme. This is just one example of why people criticise legalese, as it has not been adapted to the modern day, and the modern day has produced methods to exploit the outdated language. 

We also see that the legal system uses a lot of Latin in legalese, which is a problem because Latin is a widely outdated language that is not spoken for daily communication in the modern day. So, why is it used here? The law is criticised here for its outdated-ness because the content is surrounded and largely held up by past culture, culture that is many centuries old, originating from the old Latin and Norman French precedents. There has been mass debates about this very sort of commonly unintelligible language being used within the legal space itself, and the reason that it is still used today is to ensure that the meaning of the words stay the same over long periods of language evolution. While this is valid for the point of maintaining the law’s value, upholding and meaning, there must be accommodations made.

Proposed Solutions

Where do we start? There’s too many things to say about this subject, so I’ll make it brief. For one, we can’t immediately ditch the jargon and complex legal definitions. What we can aim to do is provide a clear English definition or translation of the term used by the law beside the legalese/Latin phrase. This ensures that people are not asking questions in court or wasting time with their barrister, and allows the public to be more informed on how the law protects them, or how it prosecutes others. In addition, we can ditch the use of abstract 3rd person phrases and terms. Phrases such as “the aforementioned party” just don’t cut it and feel impersonal, in which the law should never feel to those involved in it. We use “we” and “you”, or other simpler 2nd/3rd person pronouns that are easily legible and usable for both clientele and in court. 

Proposed Solutions

Firstly, it is incredibly important to propose that the hourly rates of lawyers should be published, as to inform the public and allow law to become a more engaged topic. Now, experts have proposed to enforce a “level-based fixed fee system”, where all firms are required to sell their lawyers by their ability at a fixed hourly rate. This is seen as quite feasible, as this sort of thing has been introduced in other, mostly European, countries. For example, Poland’s legal framework strictly outlines compensation rates for firm advocates. This means that while lawyers can negotiate high prices, the price raise will set the reimbursement amount that the loser of the case will have to pay the winner. Also, set-price systems have been able to work in countries such as Germany and Austria (although Austria is not praised for its low legal prices), showing that this sort of practice is applicable elsewhere, though not entirely generalisable. 

Other Occasions and the LGBTQ+

As mentioned earlier, we know that the legal system is heavily upheld in traditions. This has created many problems for the homosexual and traditionally marginalised subcultures within the system, allowing for misrepresentation of these individuals and “special” cases to be made, cases which are messy and complicated for juries and legal consultants alike. For example, I, the writer, attended an interview with the previous President of the Supreme Court of the UK, Lady Brenda Hale, who talked about a few cases with “other” occasions and cases about how to deal with discrimination against the people versus discrimination against the message. Although this may not entirely be categorised under accessibility, and there are going to be no proposed solutions under this, it is important to look at these cases to show how the system can go on to be more progressive and representative of these subcultures. Firstly, Lady Hale talked about a case where a gay couple was turned away from a hotel room with one queen-sized bed in it. The jury found the defense guilty, of course, as it was an active rejection of the individuals associated with the culture. However, she then went on to talk about a case where a gay man was refused service from a cake shop, as the baker said he could not write a message that supported the LGBTQ+ community on the cake the customer asked for. This is where the confusion between rejection of the community versus the message comes in, as you have to ask the question “Would he have turned down a straight man if he asked for the same thing?”,  and it was asked this way in court, in which court damages were found to be negligible. These were very important cases in the history of law, as it required Supreme Court intervention and marked itself as a substantial turning point in the representation of marginalised groups in the legal system.

Takeaways

What can we conclude from this? We can conclude that, although it is progressing slowly, the legal system can always improve and we can help with that by improving awareness about legal terminology, and making sure that law is not the complex, unknown, yet so important topic that it currently is.  My belief is that everyone should take a part in the law.