2. Communication distortions

First distortion - Plain language becomes legal language, no matter how plain. "Must" takes on the full burden of both expressive and declaratory senses. Plain language, in a legislative document, becomes plain language style. Moreover, the same word, no matter how "plain" its origin, takes on a different sense when used in a statute, because its sense is determined by its context.

This is deceptive; the legislative context demands that language, however "plain", be read in a certain way, with the application of the statutory and common law rules of interpretation, having regard to any number of statutes or cases that may bear on the use of the language, and so on. These are inescapably unique protocols of reading that do not apply in a non-legislative context.

Take an example: the use of the second-person singular "you" to address the reader in a legal document. This technique has mostly been applied, to my knowledge in insurance contracts, but even there (with an audience restricted by the direct contractual relationship) such usage must be hedged around with qualifications and sometimes multiple definitions ("In this Part, "you" means such-and-such" etc.). The deceptively direct and simple form of address is distorted into something complex by its very presence in a legal document.

Desmond Manderson comments on such a "denaturalising" effect of law when he says that:

"Sometimes, like a secret handshake, a password or a trapdoor, codes conceal the very fact that they conceal." (3).