The Origins of Legal English

Legal English reflects the mixture of languages which has produced the English language generally. However, it owes a particular debt to French and Latin.

Following the Norman invasion of England in 1066, French became the official language of England, although most ordinary people still spoke English. For a period of nearly 300 years, French was the language of legal proceedings, with the result that many words in current legal use have their roots in this period. These include property, estate, chattel, lease, executor and tenant. During this period, Latin was the language of formal records and statutes. However, since only the learned were fluent in Latin, it never became the language of legal pleading or debate.

Therefore, for several centuries following the Norman invasion, three languages were used in England. English remained the spoken language of the majority of the population, but almost all writing was done in French or Latin. English was not used in legal matters. In 1356, the Statute of Pleading was enacted (in French). It stated that all legal proceedings should be in English, but recorded in Latin.

As the printed word became more widely used, some writers made an effort to adopt words derived from Latin, in order to make their text more sophisticated. Some legal words taken from Latin in this way are adjacent, frustrate, inferior, legal, quiet and subscribe.

English was adopted for different kinds of legal documents at different times. Wills began to be written in English in about 1400. Statutes were written in Latin until about 1300, in French until 1485, in English and French for a few years, and in English alone from 1489.

The result of this history is that modern legal English contains an unusually high percentage of words and phrases derived from French and Latin as compared to ordinary English. Consider this simple force majeure clause:

Neither party shall be liable to the other for failure to perform or delay in the performance of its obligations caused by any circumstances beyond its reasonable control.

It contains 28 words, of which 17 are Old English, 7 Old French and 4 Latin. Of the Old English words, 9 are articles or prepositions (e.g. the, to, for, in, by). All the important legal terms (e.g. party, liable, obligations, reasonable, perform) are either Old French or Latin.

It follows that Latin-based terminology is essential to legal English. To use a computing analogy, we might say that where legal English is concerned, English is the ‘hardware’ which determines the grammatical construction of the sentences, but the Latin-based terminology is the ‘software’ which provides the legal meaning.

If I tried to draft the same clause relying solely on Germanic-based language, I would fail. The closest I can get is:

It’s not anyone’s fault if they cannot do what they said they would do owing to something they could not do anything about.

Here, we have 23 words, of which 22 are from Old English and Old Norse (an old Scandinavian language) and only one (fault) is from Latin. But it is a painfully unsophisticated text, which lacks the legal precision of the first text and would not work at all without the use of the word fault.