The tendency in the advocacy of plain language for the law to be placed somewhere "outside" the statute runs up against the limit imposed by legislation's self-authorising, self-originating nature.

This inclination of plain language advocates to conflate legal documents with non-legal texts may not take proper account of the demands of statutory form. The use of plain language has the tendency of masking the character of the legislative text, that is, its very status as law can be disguised.

More significantly, the plain language model of one:one communication of legislation does not reflect the actual communication model that governs the transmission of law via statue. The twin demands of multiple, future, never entirely predictable applications of a statute and the certainties of a single authoritative text with a containable penumbra of interpretation are difficult to reconcile at the best of times. It helps no one that plain language legislative proposals are premised on overly simple notions of reception, or (on the other hand) utopian dreams of proliferating text and interpretation that ignore the conservative demands of the rule of law for stable legislative meaning.

A final reality check. For many, the law is not a welcome visitor. No matter how plainly or obscurely drafted, no matter how well or badly disguised as plain language, the letter of the law launched from the far reaches of State power slides under the door to haunt each of us in our locked rooms.