The Licence

In terms of the Letters Patent granted by Her late Majesty Queen Victoria to her Printers for Scotland and of the instructions issued by Her said Majesty in Council, dated Eleventh July Eighteen Hundred and Thirty-Nine, I hereby License and Authorise WILLIAM COLLINS SONS AND COMPANY LIMITED. One Hundred and Fourty Four Cathedral Street, Glasgow, to Print and Publish, as by the Authority of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, and Edition of the New Testament and the Book of Psalms in Minion type quadragesimo-octavo size to consist of Two Hundred and Fifty thousand copies as proposed in their declaration dated the Twenty First day of December Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Six, the terms and conditions of the said Instructions being always and in all points fully complied with and observed by the said WILLIAM COLLINS SONS AND COMPANY LIMITED. Dated at Edinburgh the Tenth day of January Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Seven.

(W.R.Milligan) (Lord Advocate)

Nominal construction and nondefinite clauses are typical of the language of the law. The licence quoted provides an example of this characteristic:

“… The terms and conditions of the said Instructions being always and in all points fully complied with and observed…”

The author of this single-sentence licence does not avoid repetition of certain words and phrases, especially when it is necessary to connect clauses. In this respect also the licence is representative of legal English in general; exactness and clarity of meaning are much more important than smooth and balanced style.

The desire to make the language clear so that there is no ambiguity or possible misinterpretation of the text is the reason for changing the position of adverbials and modifying phrases; in legal documents these occur next to that element of the sentence to which they refer, as in the following sample:

… the destruction by the culprit of the document…

For the same reason, that is to make misinterpretation impossible, dates are given in words instead of figures. The last part of the licence reads accordingly: the Tenth Day of January, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Seven.

Paragraphing is often absent from legal documents; so are commas and other symbols of punctuation. As a result legal writing may assume the form of a block of print.

All these features of legal English make it stylistically monotonous, on the other hand, it is marked by extreme clarity and precision.

The fact that legal English must avoid ambiguity and must make statements in a clear and exact way accounts for the tendency to give a pedantic enumeration of all kinds of possible situations, relations, persons and objects involved.

The legal English spoken in court does not differ much from its written form as regards unemotional objectivity and a degree of pedantry; this does not apply to the defence pleas and prosecuting charges which are meant to appeal to the emotions of the jury members – it is not so much logic as sentiment that matters then.

X. Read the text carefully and answer the questions which follow: