Linguistic Rules of Legal Technique: Reasonableness, Obligation, Efficiency
УДК 340.134 ББК 67.0
Abstract
The article discusses the requirements that are necessary to simplify the text of the law and increase its intelligibility. The main attention is paid to the rules for the use of contextual and generally accepted abbreviations, because they can significantly reduce the volume of the law, save it unnecessary repetitions and make it more understandable. Examples of inconsistent use of contextual abbreviations by the legislator are given, as well as examples of texts in which it would be appropriate to use abbreviations. It is concluded that the effectiveness of technical legal rules is possible only if they are reasonable and obligatory to comply to. It is proved that the problem of the complexity of the modern Russian legal language needs a planned state policy, covering the reform of both the rules of legislative technique and the legislative procedure itself. As tools to assess the effectiveness of these rules and support their observance, it is proposed to establish a mandatory automatic check of bills for syntactic complexity, as well as to involve focus groups to assess the level of readability of texts and the comprehensibility of the terms and abbreviations used in them. The study is financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project № 21-18-00484, https://rscf.ru/project/21-18-00484/.
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