Legal pragmatics

This essay deals with the problem of the relationship between legal language(s) and natural language(s). Is legal language a part of the common or natural languages, or is it a technical language? In order to deal with the problem, however, we must first be able to say what the differences are between common and technical languages. The distinction between natural and common languages on the one hand, and technical and artificial languages on the other, plainly requires a conceptual clarification. The intuitive feeling that we are confronting a technical language whenever we meet a lot of difficult words is a starting point, but plainly does not suffice to draw a plausible distinction that could apply to non-obvious cases such as the language of law. Certainly the presence of infrequent and/or difficult terms is a prima facie symptom of non-naturalness, but it ends up being misleading. I shall mention only two of the reasons why this is so. First, terms migrate from natural languages to technical and artificial ones, and vice versa. Secondly, we should remember that the complete lexicon of a natural language consists of hundreds of thousands of words, of which only about 2000 (in Italian) make up the ‘highly used lexicon’, the terms used and understood by most people. If most of the words of a natural language are difficult to a normal speaker, then by itself the presence of difficult terms cannot be evidence that we are dealing with a technical or artificial language. In this essay I propose instead a pragmatic criterion for distinguishing between natural languages and instrumental/artificial ones. This means that the key distinguishing feature is the different overall function of the language. The language of the law will be characterized by its peculiar function. These different functions are pragmatic aspects of languages, which generate as secondary aspects those features at the semantic and syntactical levels that make artificial/instrumental languages difficult for the layman to understand, and make and keep natural languages easy for all their native speakers to understand. According to this criterion, legal languages are neither natural (in this sense) nor artificial, but have features of both, belonging to the intermediate category of administered languages. They are instrumental to dealing with the law: that is, they are used with organized force administered by authorities. There is a sub-group of expert people, jurists, who are proficient in the intricacies of the law and of the language of law.