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Conferences and meetings
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Last updated 6 March 2010
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| Clarity's 4th international conference: Lisbon 12 - 14 October 2010 Updated 6 March 2010
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The organisers intend to publish conference-registration information and the call for papers later this month. Meanwhile you can register your interest on the conference website and you will then receive updating emails as they become available.
Some people have reported a problem using the "submit" button to register their interest. The organisers believe that this only affects some versions of Explorer but they are trying to fix it. Meanwhile, if it applies to you, email your details to Clarity's Portuguese rep (and conference organiser)
Sandra Martins and she will put you on their list manually.
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| Clarity's London breakfast meetings Updated 29 November 2009
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Next meeting: 3 February
The next breakfast will be on Wednesday, 3 February, from 8.30 to 9.30 am as usual.
The topic is Plain language in legal education and we will be inviting all the London colleges that train lawyers to send someone along.
It will be at the same place as the October meeting: the Guildhall, Gresham Street, London EC2V 7HH, in the City Marketing Suite. It has its own entrance, marked G on the map. Thanks to Clarity member Paul Double for providing the venue for this meeting.
Do bring others if you would like. As usual, there is no charge and guests are welcome (though we do ask non-members to join Clarity if they come a second time). For a membership form and details of how to join follow the links on this site.
Please email
Daphne Perry if you're coming so that we can estimate numbers.
Last meeting
Daphne Perry thanks Sir Edward Caldwell and all the other parliamentary counsel who contributed to another very interesting and enjoyable meeting in October, and she adds this report:
Parliamentary counsel's drafting guides
They mentioned these two drafting guides and invited comments on them from Clarity members:
Please send your comments to
Robin Dormer at the Law Commission.
Some other points made
Pressures on parliamentary drafting not all present in other common-law jurisdictions include the increasing volume of new legislation, lack of time, complexity introduced by devolution and EU legislation, amendments during the legislative process, "stakeholders", the two houses of parliament and individual MPs.
The top priority is to make sure new legislation works, even if it's hard to understand. But some criminal justice legislation, for example, is so full of cross-references that judges could find it hard to work out their sentencing powers on a busy morning in court.
Consultation hasn't improved legislation as one might have expected. Stakeholders respond at the last minute - either to put pressure on the legislators or perhaps through habit - and still miss points that quickly emerge in practice. They may not be able to spare time from their day job to give a draft law the full attention it needs. Would it be better to enact the draft and then amend it in response to comments?
Consolidation is increasingly rare. When it does happen, the intervening case law may have developed the law in a way that complicates the task of the consolidator.
Nobody sets out to draft complicated law but it takes time and effort to simplify. These resources may not be available.
Other jurisdictions such as Australia and New Zealand have templates and drafting rules. UK Parliamentary counsel don't, preferring to keep their techniques flexible and allow innovation, although (as mentioned above) they do now have guidelines on clarity and on other specific issues.
The rewritten tax law was welcomed when taxing the individual. When they started to re-write corporation tax, the accountants who were already comfortable with the old versions didn't like it as much. Although the project is coming to an end, some of the techniques it introduced as a novelty in 1996 have now become standard.
The Coroners Bill did not really have the hyped plain English translation alongside: it was just the usual explanatory note, but interleaved with the bill instead of separate.
"It's easy to simplify things if things are simple." "You can't make something simpler than it actually is by drafting".
Next meeting
The meeting room at the Guildhall was so comfortable, and the breakfast so good, that we agreed to hold the next meeting there too. Thanks to Paul Double and the City of London for this hospitality. (If anyone would prefer to return to Starbucks in future, please say so.) Meanwhile, Veronica Bailey has also kindly offered to host a meeting in Halsbury House, LexisNexis' building in Chancery Lane.
Recording meetings
A member has offered to record our sessions so we can put an edited podcast on Clarity's website. The group agreed this would prevent the kind of open discussion we usually enjoy, so we would rather not record our next meeting. Again, if you disagree, please come along and say so.
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University of Lapland's International Conference on Legal Linguistics: Finland, 17-20 March 2010
Law and Language in International Partnerships and Conflicts
Added 29 November 2009
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Abstract deadline: 15 December
This has been billed as a rare opportunity for researchers and practitioners in both law and language to share their latest insights. The conference website says:
- It has long been recognised that business relations, partnerships and contracting are all language-related issues and similarly failures in these relationships are failures in language use in one way or another.
- The conference will focus on successful international partnerships from a proactive point of view. The salient questions in this context are: How language risks may arise and how they may be avoided. Where this process fails, we must go further to investigate how disputes are handled in arbitration, mediation and litigation. We will particularly address the issue whether there is a gap between the real and the ideal.
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PLAIN's 7th international conference: Sydney, 15-17 October 2009 Updated 29 November 2009
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This was by all accounts a tremendous conference, a triumph for organiser Neil James, to whom we owe a great debt. For a report and photographs see
the conference's continuing website.
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University of Naples 2's International Workshop on Legal Linguistics: Naples, June 2010
The Language of Law: pulling together different strands and disciplines
Added 29 November 2009
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The organising committee writes:
- As part of its commitment to research in the field of language and law, the Faculty of Law of the Seconda Universitˆ degli Studi di Napoli (University of Naples 2) is pleased to announce its first international workshop, to be held in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Caserta, Italy in June 2010.
Please see the attachment for more details, including the call for papers.
Their email address is
languageoflaw@unina2.it
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| PLAIN's next conference: Stockholm, 9-11 June 2011 Added 29 November 2009
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The conference theme Establishing the Framework for Plain Language is designed to continue the development of an international standard and infrastructure for plain language that started in Amsterdam 2007, and continued in Sydney 2009.
You can register your interest on the conference website.
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| The Language of Law conference, London, Tuesday 13 October (afternoon) Updated 29 November 2009
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It was disappointing to see The Times report this event as "a knockback" for "the proposal that legal language with its elaborate circumlocutions and Latin tags should be abolished in favour of plain English". The story continues that while "the pre-debate vote conducted by Lord Justice Jacob ... showed a probable walkover by the advocates of reform", the arguments for change were "progressively derailed"; apparently the arguments were based on the old confusion between "clear" and "omitting detail".
But I have been told that it wasn't a real debate "as all sides agreed in essence (about the need for reform). I think they had to make the views that extreme, otherwise, what a boring debate it would have been!"
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| CALC's conference: Hong Kong 2009 |
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Our congratulations to the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel for their very enjoyable and useful Hong Kong conference at the beginning of April.
The presentations (several of which were by Clarity members) are to be published in future issues of CALC's journal, The Loophole.
For details of CALC and of the conference, and for back numbers of The Loophole, click here.
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| Clarity's 3rd international conference: Mexico 2008 |
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Our 3rd international conference was a great success, attracting nearly 300 participants, many of them part of an initiative to introduce plain Spanish into Mexican government.
We owe a great debt to our Mexican representative, Salomé Flores Sierra Franzoni, her colleagues at the Secretaria de la Funcion Publica, and ITAM, for organising and hosting it.
In addition to the program sessions, those members of the Clarity committee who were in Mexico held a rare face-to-face committee meeting; and the partly-formed international plain language working group on professional standards (see our News page) held a preliminary meeting.
Click here for the unedited text of the President's opening remarks, the text of Bengt Baedecke and Eva Olovsson's presentation, and pdf or pps versions of Powerpoint presentations. Fuller reports will appear in Clarity 61 (edited by Salomé and due for publication to members in May). Meanwhile, click here for the program.
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