Statutes

Many statutes exhibit the same regrettable verbosity. They also often retain the archaic language of earlier statutes. This produces a heady mix that tests both concentration and knowledge. The result is incomprehensible to all except hardened lawyers. I won't bore you with quotations; you will all have come across plentiful examples. To me they call to mind Lord Justice Harman's experience on reading the English Housing Act 1957:

"To reach a conclusion on this matter involved the court in wading through a monstrous legislative morass, staggering from stone to stone and ignoring the marsh gas exhaling from the forest of schedules lining the way on each side. I regarded it at one time, I must confess, as a Slough of Despond through which the court would never drag its feet, but I have by leaping from tussock to tussock as best I might, eventually, pale and exhausted, reached the other side."⁶

If you will allow me to mention one last example: the worst perpetrators of statutory obscurity are the four so-called "covenants for title", used in conveyances and similar deeds to warrant title to land. They are so tortuous that no-one seems to have noticed that one of their sentences lacks a main verb. The English Court of Appeal described them as a "jungle of verbiage"⁷. Perhaps their verbal eccentricity is not surprising: they were drafted by Sir Orlando Bridgman in England in the 1660s and are still used, virtually unaltered, to this day⁸ - illustrating how precedents preserve not only yesterday's legal concepts but also yesterday's legal language.