Legal language and democracy – 01/18/2024 – Thaís Nicoleti

The National Judiciary Pact for Simple Language arrives at a good time, announced at the end of last year by Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the National Council of Justice (CNJ). The adjective “simple”, generally associated with what is common (a simple room), modest (simple clothes) or low on a hierarchical scale (a simple employee), can also characterize what is devoid of refinement or affectation – and that is where “simple language” enters Law.

In the legal field, the tradition of using ornate language still persists, which is revealed both in the laudatory tone and the selection of rare words and in the use of long adverbs, abundant adjectives, syntactic inversions, long periods, excess particles of negation, all of this framing the use of specific legal terminology. In Brazil, the popular term “juridiquês” was coined to describe this language, which has the air of a hermetic language, whose understanding is open only to beginners.

If the terminology of the area has its function, as occurs in the field of science, technology or even philosophy, what seems unreasonable is the refinement, that is, a certain “forensic style”, observed in the procedural documents. An example may help the reader understand the problem. Let’s see:

“The documents that inform this process do not demonstrate a situation of teratology, flagrant illegality or abuse of power that authorizes the ex officio order. The Court of origin stated that ‘there is no statement in the record that the prison where the re-educated person is imprisoned does not meet sanitary conditions consistent with the protection of life, nor even that the re-educated person is not receiving or cannot receive adequate treatment. inside the argastulus’.”

“Not demonstrating a teratology situation” is a far-fetched way of saying that the procedural documents do not contain anomalies or irregularities. “Teratology”, however, is cultism. The term, of Greek origin, is composed of the radical “terat(o)-“, a sign emitted by the gods, a bad omen, a frightening thing or monstrous animal, and the radical “-logia”, forming nouns that name arts, sciences, treaties etc. This word is frequently used in forensic practice, but it is not a technical term, like “office order”. It is therefore necessary to distinguish one thing from the other.

“Ergástulo”, a scholarly synonym for “prison”, is, strictly speaking, a term used to designate the prison in which, in ancient Rome, punished slaves worked in chains. By extension of meaning, it refers to any prison. This is eruditeness. Terms that allude to Roman Law are still frequent in procedural documents, as well as Latinisms and now Anglicisms.

The refinement is not limited, however, to vocabulary. The syntactic organization of the period also reveals the search for an aura of complexity. Inversions of order are common, as in “The court of origin settled”, the subject postposed to the verb (instead of “The court of origin settled” or “The court of origin established”), or the use of litotes, figure of speech that consists of affirming something by denying its opposite (something like “I didn’t say that the place is not good”, instead of saying that “the place is good”, or “There is no record in the records stating that the lattice where the re-educated person is located [sic] prisoner does not meet sanitary conditions consistent with the protection of life”).

A curious point in this story is that, even in these erudite-looking texts, deviations from the standard norm of the Portuguese language are frequent. In the section “where the re-educated person is imprisoned”, we have a good example of a vain attempt to sound more “cultured”. The adjective subordinate clause (starting with “where”) requires proclisis (“where the student is”), but, as we know, especially in Brazil, there is a perception that enclisis (unstressed pronoun after the verb) is a more erudite – this diffuse perception comes from the fact that, in our country, proclisis coincides with the most frequent use in everyday life.

By the way, it should be said that mesoclisis (I would say, it will be established), although very low frequency even among well-educated speakers, continues to be used in legal texts, including laws (see the constitutional text, for example). It is not intended here to advocate for the abolition of the pronoun placement system, which is the least of the problems within the scope of this discussion. The set of elements – lexical choices and syntactic structures – listed according to the criterion of rarity is what makes language an obstacle to understanding when its main function is to communicate. Communicating is creating a common space of understanding. The language must be transparent, otherwise the sacred democratic right of the population will be violated.

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