La incidència de la tècnica legislativa en el llenguatge jurídic

Resum

The study of legislative language, a subspecialty of the science of legislation, is a consequence of the broadly shared awareness that the quality of language in laws has suffered because of the excessive volume of legislation and the accelerated speed with which it moves through the system. In this paper, the author sets out to study the causes of the dangerous and growing number of technical defects in the language of the law, and offers various proposals for improvement. The study of legislative language tries to seek solutions to defects of quality in the development of laws; it therefore analyses the phases the legislative message goes through. This article focusses on the drafting of the language, since problems derived from poor language use have a serious effect on legal certainty. The areas the author discusses after the introduction include subjects such as the difference between legislative language and the language of jurists, the relationships between laws and language, the close link between legal language and everyday language. Furthermore, the author establishes a classification of legal language terms and sets forth the objective of the study of legislative language: to achieve clarity of language in the law. In this regard, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of legal language are analysed. The problems inherent in legislative language are also mentioned. Defects of quality in legislative language do not only arise from defects shared with everyday language. They are also the result of specific causes that are unique to legislative language. The result is a legislative language which is vaguer and less precise. The study of legislative language should facilitate the work of the legislator in the drafting of laws. It aims to inject certainty into the task of the party charged with interpreting and enforcing the law.