Язык нормативных правовых актов: пора ли бить тревогу?

Вестник Пермского университета. Юридические науки. 2022. № 3(57). С. 399–426.

Knutov A., Chaplinskiy A., Alimpeev D.

Introduction: the article describes the experience of assessing the readability of regulatory legal acts by analyzing the complexity of their syntactic constructions. According to the subjective perception, normative texts become more complicated from year to year, which makes it difficult to interpret them and understand the legal meaning. Purpose: to test this hypothesis based on metrics and, if confirmed, to formulate recommendations for simplifying legal texts. For this, the methods used to assess the complexity of official texts and their simplification in Russia and in the world were studied. Methods: not finding suitable tools for assessing the readability of such syntactically burdened texts as regulatory legal acts, the authors applied their own assessment methodology based on machine analysis of syntax indicators. The study was conducted in relation to specially prepared corpora of texts: 12 corpora of all federal laws relevant for different dates, and a corps of 3390 by-laws. Results: the syntactic complexity of regulatory legal acts increases with time. For example, federal regulations in effect at the end of 2021 are 33% more complex than they were in 1991. Conclusions: the modern language of regulatory legal acts is excessively complicated. The review of the literature showed that the task of counteracting the growing complexity of legal texts is relevant not only for Russia. To overcome the existing negative practice, administrative measures are required, such as the preparation of recommendations for the texts of draft regulatory legal acts and the expansion of the subject of their linguistic expertise.

Keywords: plain legal language, язык законов, readability, language of laws, language of regulations, syntactic complexity of regulations, evaluation of syntactic complexity, legal technique of rulemaking, linguistic expertise of regulation drafts, язык нормативных правовых актов, удобочитаемость, читабельность текста, синтаксическая сложность нормативных правовых актов, оценка синтаксической сложности, «простой» юридический язык, юридическая техника нормотворчества, лингвистическая экспертиза проектов нормативных правовых актов

Publication based on the results of: Discourse Practices across Professional, Cultural, and Social Groups (2022)