Introduction

The modern style of legal drafting owes much to the plain English movement in law. This chapter considers the history of that movement in a number of countries, concentrating on the period from the 1960s to date.

We begin with a reminder that calls to simplify legal language are hardly new. We mentioned some early examples in Chapter 1. A number of leading nineteenth century reformers made scathing attacks on lawyers' language. Jeremy Bentham was particularly vitriolic in attacking the argument that ‘precision’ or ‘certainty’ demanded a repetitious style:

Later in the nineteenth century, the English barrister George Coode published his influential book, On Legislative Expression. In it, he rejected the convoluted style of traditional legal drafting: ‘Nothing more is required than that instead of an accidental and incongruous style, the common popular structure of plain English be resorted to.’

Many of Bentham's and Coode's suggestions were adopted by Lord Macaulay in his Indian Penal Code, described by a modern legislative drafter as ‘to this day a shining example of legal wisdom and clarity’.