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are indispensable linguistic devices which bring in precision, clarity,
unambiguity and all-inclusiveness and so on; but to others, it is a mere ploy
to promote solidarity between the members of the specialist community
and to keep non-specialists at a respectable distance. The legislative
language of the law, in some perspectives, has been regarded as nothing
more than pure linguistic nonsense bringing into professional discourse
pomposity, verbosity, flabbiness and circumlocution (Gibbons 136).
Legislative language is highly impersonal and de-contextualized,
the general function of which is directive, to impose obligations and to
confer rights. As legal draftsmen are well aware of the age-old human
capacity to wriggle out of obligations and to stretch rights to often
unexpected limits, in order to guard against these eventualities, they
attempt to define their model world of obligations and rights, permissions
and prohibitions, as precisely, clearly and unambiguously as words will
permit. Another factor which further complicates their tasks is that laws
generally deal with a universe of human behavior, which is unrestricted in
the sense that it is impossible to predict exactly what may happen within it.
Nevertheless, the attempt to refer to every conceivable contingency within
their model world and this gives the legislative writing the all-inclusive
quality of it. However, the laws are also made to apply to real life situation
and are invariably interpreted in the context of a particular dispute,
which leads to the drafter’s need to strike a balance and achieve the dual
characteristic of clarity, precision and unambiguity on the one hand, and
the all-inclusiveness on the other hand. The cumulative sense of legislation
of laws adds to the challenge of drafting a law that has to harmonize itself
with all the other laws that already exist before it, in the words of Caldwell:
Very rarely is a new legislative provision entirely freestanding… it is part
of a jigsaw puzzle… in passing a new provision you are merely bringing
one more piece and so you have to acknowledge that what you are about
to do may affect some other bit of the massive statute book (Reported in
Gibbons, 1994: 151).
The language being the primary vehicle of legislative intent in the
law, a close, careful and critical consideration of the language use is of
great importance, in order not only to understand rights and obligations
provided for in the law, but also to equip drafters with an approach or
framework to drafting provisions and clauses that linguistically accurately
embody the thought behind them, in order to avoid losing the spirit of the
law in a heap of confusing and misleading legalese.
From the above mentioned premise of the importance of language