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Legal English, also known as legalese, [1] is a register of English used in legal writing. It differs from day-to-day spoken English in a variety of ways including the use of specialized vocabulary, syntactic constructions, and set phrases such as legal doublets .
B.M.Gandhi's Legal Language, Legal Writing & General English ISBN 978-9351451228. New ELS: English for Law Students written by Maria Fraddosio (Naples, Edizioni Giuridiche Simone, 2008) is a course book for Italian University Students. The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, created by Scribes: The American Society of Legal Writers.
Larry Solum, Professor of Law at Georgetown University, expands on this premise: Some laws are meant for all citizens (e.g., criminal statutes) and some are meant only for specialists (e.g., some sections of the tax code). A text that means one thing in a legal context, might mean something else if it were in a technical manual or a novel.
Establishing a "test" (that is, a measurable standard that can be applied by courts in future decisions), such as the Oakes test (in Canadian law) or the Bolam test (in English law). Sometimes, with regard to a particular provision of a written constitution, only one court decision has been made.
In contrast to English common law, which consists of enormous tomes of case law, codes in small books are easy to export and easy for judges to apply. However, today there are signs that civil and common law are converging. [64] EU law is codified in treaties, but develops through de facto precedent laid down by the European Court of Justice. [65]
Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to as "legislation" while it remains under consideration to distinguish it from other business. Legislation can have many purposes: to regulate, to authorize, to outlaw, to provide (funds), to sanction, to grant, to declare, or to restrict.
The State also has a continuing legal and ethical obligation to turn over to me all exculpatory evidence (i.e. evidence which proves my client is not guilty) that never goes away.
Legal citation is the practice of crediting and referring to authoritative documents and sources. The most common sources of authority cited are court decisions (cases), statutes, regulations, government documents, treaties, and scholarly writing.