Martin Cutts of the Plain Language Commission of England originally published his classic Lucid Law in 1994, with an updated version in 2000. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of language and law, as well as related disciplinary areas such as applied linguistics and English for specific purposes. The legal profession is moving towards simpler drafting. After an encouraging start, the state-sponsored plaintext initiative “Progetto Chiaro!” failed a few years ago. Once again, Italians have to deal with the complexity of bureaucracy, an area that still needs radical reform. The American Bar Association passed the resolution, which recommends that federal agencies draft regulations in plain language. “Seven years have passed since the publication of Legal English and Plain Language: an introduction (Williams 2004). Since then, there have been several changes in the field of legal drafting in English-speaking countries and institutions that are moving towards proposals supported by the plain language movement. In this article, I try to describe and contextualize some of the major changes that have taken place since 2004. Perhaps the most striking change in recent years in the English-speaking world has taken place in the UK, particularly in Edinburgh and Westminster. In 2004, the newly formed Scottish Parliament had not yet raised the issue of modernising the editorial style of its laws. But it should happen soon.

Also in Westminster in 2004, with the exception of the Tax Law Rewriting Project (Williams, 2007), there was little evidence that the legislation would undergo the major changes that have taken place recently. A number of areas of legal language have also been modernized in recent years in the United States, although the impact of plain language on the drafting of laws has been less severe than in the United Kingdom. My main conclusion is that if we look at the issue of legal drafting and plain language throughout the English-speaking world, there has been a shift in focus since 2004. Not so long ago, I spoke of a “north-south divide” (Williams 2006:239), with innovation coming mainly from the southern hemisphere (particularly Australia and New Zealand), while the northern hemisphere – particularly the United States and the United Kingdom – seemed more resistant to change. Today, I see things a little differently: I would be more inclined to distinguish between national editorial boards as “innovators” and international editorial boards as “conservatives.” The recent changes in editorial style in the United Kingdom and, to some extent, the United States do not seem to have been achieved in international forums where English is one of the official languages, particularly the United Nations and the European Union. I briefly discuss why international organizations may be less inclined than national organizations to change their editorial style. ODNI trains our employees and has created a monitoring process. We must use clear language in every document that the Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, Australia, “seeks to promote fairness and equality in the justice system and improve access to justice, particularly for socially and economically disadvantaged people.” The Foundation considers clear legal drafting to be an essential part of this objective. The website contains information on plain language writing instructions and access to their free bi-weekly plain text newsletter. In this post, I will begin by briefly describing some of the main characteristics of written legal English that distinguish it from other genres, such as sentence length and complexity of sentence structures, repetition, high concentration of archaic or rarely used Latinisms and lexical elements, etc.

(Bhatia 1993; Tiersma, 1999). Such characteristics have been widely regarded as exclusive for centuries, as they entrench the privileges of the legal profession. However, with the growth of the plain language movement in recent decades in all major English-speaking countries, calls for radical changes in legal English have spread (Asprey 1991), and cases of legal texts adopted according to plain language principles are already found in several countries, for example.