Понятность языка правосудия: опыт эмпирического исследования содержания и синтаксиса судебных решений

Закон. 2024. № 2. С. 159–177.

Chaplinskiy A., Knutov A., Alimpeev D.

For many years, the primary challenges in the legal sphere regarding language in legal proceedings have been the utilization of national languages of the republics and foreign access to justice. However, the authors of this paper hypothesize that citizens and organizations of Russian origin often require assistance in translating “legal Russian” to “everyday Russian”. This is due to the continuing syntactic complexity found in court decision language despite widespread attempts to simplify the presentation of information. The authors' previous research into speech practices of laws and bylaws supports this hypothesis. The authors designed research questions to investigate the hypothesis of changes in the comprehensibility of the language used in court decisions over time. Additionally, they aimed to determine whether said changes depend on the type of courts, the category of cases, or the court instance level. Empirical research methods were used to examine not only whole court decisions but also their elements. Moreover, a representative sample exceeding 15,000 texts was studied. The analysis was conducted at different parts in court decisions including introduction, description, reasoning, and operation. Additional fragments such as facts, citations of legal acts, analysis of evidence, and judge's judgments were also studied. The methods of computational linguistics confirmed a consistent increase in the syntactic complexity of court decisions over time. According to the author's methodology, court decisions are among the most complex legal texts. In essence, legal acts citations contribute to the bulk of these texts, making up the largest proportion (40% on average) in the descriptive and reasoning parts of the decision, compared to other semantic fragments. The research enabled the authors to compile a catalogue of detrimental speech practices used in court decisions, alongside recommendations for their rectification.

Keywords: computational linguistics, доступность правосудия, syntactic complexity, синтаксическая сложность, вычислительная лингвистика, accessibility of justice, readability, удобочитаемость, language of justice, language of judgments, language comprehensibility, structure of judgments, язык правосудия, язык судебных решений, понятность языка, структура судебных решений

Publication based on the results of: Discourse practices of Russian society: Diversity and Dynamics (2023)