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2021

The 8th workshop of law and language was hosted online on 7th July 2021.  The workshop was entitled, "Law, Language, and Gender: the way forward".  Click to download the report on the workshop.

2016

The conference on Law and Language took place on th 29th June 2016 at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Title: "Why is legal language so complicated? Legislative drafters and linguists compare notes"
Date:  Wednesday 29 June, 14.00-17.30.
Venue: Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR.

2014

The 2nd workshop of Law and Language was hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies on 27 June 2014. The main theme was “Legislative Drafting and Translation”

Three important themes have been discussed in the workshops:

  1. Multilingual Legal Systems: Challenges and benefits for legal systems which operate in more than one language
  2. Translation and EU Texts: The EU institutions function in 24 languages but to some extent English serves as a lingua franca. Is EU English a separate variety of English?
  3. Legal Translation and Language: Linguistic and textual features of special-purpose texts and their function in specialized translation

Another event has been the Seminar on "Legislative Drafting: New Trends in Plain Language" that was hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies on Monday 3 November 2014.

Four important issues have been raised and discussed in the seminar:

  1. Modern legal drafting
  2. Can the EU write clearly?
  3. Plain language: a view from the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel
  4. Is Plain Language Enough for User Friendly Legislation?

In a joint event with Clarity, Professor Xanthaki and Dr. Pennisi explored whether a layered structure is a workable way to promote clarity in legislation and other documents in a “Seminar of Clarification and Easification of Legislative Drafting“ 25 March 2015.

The important theme of ‘making legislative drafting clearer and easier’ has been discussed from various perspectives and different fields of research, involving plain language drafting, legislative drafting and multilingual systems, easification and simplification strategies applied to legislative drafting.