Hovrätternas domar: mellan klarspråksidealet och den juridiska verkligheten

Abstract

For almost half a century now Sweden has been a frontrunner in the plain language movement. The Swedish court system is one of the sections of the State that has been taking various initiatives to make the language it uses accessible to the ordinary citizen. This thesis focuses upon the tension between on the one side the ideals of the plain language movement and on the other side the traditions, the needs and the practical limitations of the legal word. The thesis consists of a theoretical part which discusses the characteristics of 'legalese' as a language for specific purposes, a historical chapter which outlines the development of the plain language movement (klarspråksrörelse) in Sweden and an empirical chapter. The latter concentrates upon the language used in twelve randomly selected recent decisions of the six Courts of Appeal (hovrätterna). In 2008, the Swedish courts released a strategy in which they embraced a plain language test (klarspråkstest) for court decisions. The full test, which has been drawn up by a linguist, consists of 30 questions that concern not only the language used in court decisions, but also the way in which they are structured. For this limited probe nine of the questions from the klarspråkstest were used to review the accessibility of the Court of Appeal decisions. The result of this analysis is that the twelve court of appeal decisions meet several of the plain language standards from the test completely or to a considerable extent. None of the decisions contain very long sentences nor are the sentences unnecessarily complicated. The use of passive forms or of 'substantivization' is not so widespread that it impairs the readability of the text. On the face of the twelve selected decisions it seems that the Courts of Appeal try to write their verdicts in a language that is accessible.However, the decisions that were analysed also show characteristics that undermine their accessibility to a wider public. The actual outcome of the case is often worded in formal, abstract language and too often legal terminology that is essential to the case is not explained. The largest hindrance to accessibility lies however in the structure of the decisions. None of the decisions has a table of content or a summary at the beginning. The interested reader must first read the decision in its entirety (and that includes the decision of the lower court that has dealt with the case previously) to get to the essence of the Court of Appeal's reasoning. The conclusion, which due to the limited representativity of the selection can only be considered valid for the twelve Court of Appeal decisions that were analysed, is that the plain language movement seems to have succeeded in making court decisions more accessible for lawyers, but not necessarily for the ordinary Swedish citizen.