Linguistic insights into legislative drafting

This article analyses several complex aspects concerning legislative drafting, which derive both from specific legal and linguistic traditions. In particular, the article shows how inaccurately-written texts may lead to confusion and misunderstanding, and as a result to complications, delays and unnecessary expenses in their application. Indeed, the formulation of legal norms is greatly conditioned by specific factors strictly depending on the different cultural, linguistic and legal environments in which it takes place. The article discusses the linguistic and textual features of some normative texts, thus providing interesting insights into how drafting procedures are influenced by different legislative drafting traditions deriving from specific legal cultures and standardised professional procedures. It also demonstrates that variations in the formulation of legal concepts in normative texts are mainly to be attributed to the different cultural traits and legal traditions of the communities for which they are meant. The analysis presented here shows that legislative texts often contain instances of vagueness and ambiguity likely to arouse uncertainty of interpretation on the reader's part. The presence of vague textual formulations is due to several reasons: normative texts aim to be as all-inclusive as possible in order to be valid in the widest range of applications; moreover, in many cases the text is worded in a vague way so as to allow more freedom to the parties involved. The last section of the article reviews some suggestions and guidelines for better legislative drafting that have been suggested in the last decades with the purpose of achieving a greater degree of clarity and consistency, and these have proved very influential in introducing important innovations in law-making with a consequent improvement of the quality of legislation.