In legal discourse, the term ‘style’ is used in a bewildering variety of senses and contexts, mundane and refined, practical and theoretical. It refers to characteristic ways legislators, judges, law enforcement agents behave and look; specific legal institutions operate; or legal systems solve problems and express distinctive mentalities and cultural patterns. Sometimes it refers to typical (national) features of judicial reasoning, sometimes to professional ‘folkways’: technicalities and rhetoric to be followed by legal actors in how to write, talk, and dress. A ‘plain style’ as opposed to legalese and jargon is supposed to make law accessible; the ‘legal stylist’ as a paralegal specialism in the ecology of modern law firms takes care of compliance with formal and substantive standards for legal documents set in ‘style books’.

Does this frequent use of the term also imply usefulness? Is the concept of style helpful in understanding law or at least some aspects of law better? How is ‘style’ related to ‘content’, ‘form’, ‘mentality’, ‘culture’, or ‘narrative’?

The five contributions to the latest issue of IJLC address these questions from a variety of perspectives. First, Zsolt Ződi explores the reasons why the long running campaigns for “Plain Legal Language” have only produced limited results in making law comprehensible. Starting from a semantic and pragmatic analysis of law-related texts and using corpus linguistics, he provides insights into the social consequences of various style registers of these texts in terms of access to the law. Bettina Bor and Miklós Könczöl seek to prepare the ground for further semiotically informed investigations into the concept of style in law. They do so by first offering a three-layered account of legal culture, indicating the place of style between the surface and the deep level, then linking that insight to the categories of Peircean phenomenology. Taking French and English contract law as examples, Catherine Valcke argues that legal styles are best understood as reasoning styles: characteristic modes of thinking about rights and obligations that emphasise different aspects of a legal institution – thus the justification of contractual claims can be genuinely different across jurisdictions. Péter Cserne critically reconstructs Konrad Zweigert’s use of style in classifying legal systems, before suggesting that in spite of Zweigert’s methodologically naïve use of the term, an aesthetic analysis is a promising way to enrich theoretical and comparative reflection on law. Alexandra Mercescu focuses on writing manners of legal scholars as the carriers of style and identifies distinct cultural patterns embedded in their disciplinary training that constrain but also promise an opportunity to change the writing style, and thereby also the mindset, of these individuals.

The diversity of these contributions suggest that, following sociologist Robert Merton, style is best characterized as a proto-concept: “an early, rudimentary, particularized and largely unexplicated idea” that lacks a clear definition but has heuristic value. It enriches the analytical toolkit of contextual legal studies. By exploring the potential of the concept of style the papers also provide insights into a number of substantive issues, including access to and uses of law; the role of doctrinal and interdisciplinary arguments in legal reasoning; the interaction of legal and moral values; and the reform of legal education.

Péter Cserne is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria University and the guest editor of a new special issue of International Journal of Law in Context on The Many Faces of ‘Style’ in Law and Legal Scholarship. The issue is available without charge until 1 November.