Law graduates learn a lot at college. Including bad writing, especially bad writing. They begin to confuse elegance with bad taste, clarity with tastelessness, technical terms with Byzantine terms. Your bookshelf has dictionaries, encyclopedias and almanacs.
Upon entering the profession, the bachelor completes this “debilitating regime” and becomes a “complete medallion,” in the irony of Machado de Assis.
The legal stylist is usually linguistically uncertain. Sergio Rodrigues, at SheetHe explained: “Due to linguistic insecurity and the fear of making mistakes, it often happens that we embellish our prose, for example exchanging “having” for “possessing” and “being” for “finding oneself.” He is the one who “fills his newsrooms with 'others' and other legal garbage.”
The bachelor doesn't say “enter” when he can say “enter,” he doesn't write “so” when he can waste a “distarte.” If you have a “word quite suitable for the exordial” at hand, why degrade yourself to a “term suitable for the initial request”? At an advanced stage, he does not accept saying “last week”. Go there and shoot a “Past Hebdomad”.
Initiation into legal language takes place through learning words. He wants to multiply the glossary of rare, strange and goodsounding synonyms. One should not repeat “Constitution” when there are a whole range of options: Magna Carta, Principal Law, Supreme Law, Law of Laws. There is “Codex Obreiro” instead of CLT, “Adjective Parchment” instead of Code of Process.
In the next lesson, you will learn not only to use traditional Latin expressions in legal jargon, but also to memorize the signs of your discernment or lack of imagination. The “data venia” has already become commonplace, but not the “tantum devolutum Quantum Appellatum”.
In addition to the Latin, the foreignness gives a cosmopolitan touch. Like Gilmar Mendes, who never invoked the German Constitutional Court without teaching us that the right thing to do was the “Federal Constitutional Court”. With sublime poetic license, he aims the camera to shout “a great confusion.” Or even like Luiz Fux, who stopped saying “actor” and adopted “player” instead, abandoning “common sense” and turning to the “common place.”
Added to this is the repertoire of flattering, eccentric forms of treatment. Instead of reducing the Federal Court of Justice to this bland name, call it “Augusto Sodalício”, “Pretório Excelso”, “Egrégio Areópago”. Address the Court as “senior judges of this troubled court.”
The advanced bachelor goes beyond exotic words. He attaches great importance to building labyrinthine syntactic structures. As a follower of the canon of almanacs, he has a special way of relating to the world of ideas and culture. Mixes pills from Aristotle with verses from Drummond. Sometimes he slips up and attributes the Internet verse “What matters is that it is always possible to start over” to Drummond, quoted in a speech by Fux.
But legalese is not just a ridiculous form of expression and a source of ridicule. In addition to aesthetics, legal language also has a political and moral impact. Ornament becomes a means of exercising authority, the stylistic agenda drives exclusion, the display of knowitalls enforces hierarchy and inequality. The privilege holder looks down on you.
Antonio Candido (“A vida ao résdochão”), reflecting on the virtues of the chronicle, notes that this literary genre “humanizes in its simplicity; and this humanization allows him, on the other hand, to recover a certain depth of meaning”. It does not serve as a “concealment of reality and even truth”; their “perspective is not that of those who write from the top of the mountain, but that of the ground floor.”
The legal stylist is an enemy of the chronicle. Being understood or pretending to be understood is the question for the bachelor lawyer. Between understanding and concealment, he chooses the dark and esoteric.
To combat the magistocratic pact of legal language, Luís Roberto Barroso, author of the clearest and most humane court judgment of all time, said to a colleague on the ground floor: “You are a terrible person, a mixture of evil, delay and hints of psychopathy” has just announced the National Judiciary Pact for Simple Language.
Initiatives like these are more fundamental than they seem. They can be effective if they are monitored by journalism and society in general. Because the sense of the ridiculous is not a noble virtue.