Let's Not Oversimplify Legal Language
![handle is hein.journals/ucollr32 and id is 368 raw text is: LET'S NOT OVERSIMPLIFY
LEGAL LANGUAGE
RAY J. AIKEN*
The rough correspondence of title between this comment and
that recently published by Professor Hager' may suggest that the
present author's thought is the complete antithesis of that so well
expressed in the earlier article. Such is not the fact; nor, I am sure,
would Professor Hager hesitate to endorse at least in general the
injunction of my title.la
Nevertheless, I rise in defense of many practices of the profession
which my esteemed confrere has denounced. He has denounced
them as being productive of what he specifically defines as unneces-
sary complication of expression, and of what he more vividly, if less
definitively, describes as gibberish, jargon, and gobbledegook. Pre-
scinding, for the moment, from the rather extreme examples which he
cites, I would invite a moment's inspection of Professor Hager's own
theory in action, in his own choice of terms.
It is to be fairly supposed that Professor Hager was writing to
a legally-trained readership, which was therefore, presumptively
literate. Had this not been true, the reference without translation
in his first line to a Greek word such as iconoclastic,2 and throughout
his discussion to such terms as maxims, archaic, obsolete, ad infinitum,
ad nauseam, interminably, psychic phenomena, heretical, and to the
admittedly inconsistent (for effect) caveat, res ipsa loquitur and the
rest would have constituted a rather brutal assault upon the first prin-
ciple of good communication. To the layman, in short, both clauses
of the Eaglet's comment4 would apply to Professor Hager's very
literate little essay; but to that author's assumed readership, neither
applied in significant degree.
Certainly there can be no disagreement that the aim and object
of good communication is, as Professor Hager insists, to be understood
*Professor of Law, Marquette University.
1. Hager, Let's Simplify Legal Language, 32 ROCKY MT. L. REV. 74 (1959).
]a. I hazard a guess, writes Professor Hager to the present author, that our
personal philosophies . . . would reveal more accord than discord in our views
on legal languages, as well as on many other matters.
2. It is to be wondered how many readers were disappointed, even utterly
discouraged, at the failure of Hager's first footnote to define the term. A number,
no doubt, reached for their Webster before pulling out their copies of Bentham,
Frank and Rodell.
3. These phrases, unlike res ipsa, etc., are not apologized for by Hager
presumably because non-lawyers have adopted them.
4. Speak English, said the Eaglet. I don't know the meaning of half
these long words, and what's more, I don't believe you do either.
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Let's Not Oversimplify Legal Language
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