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

Abstract

For many years, the primary challenges in the legal sphere regarding language in legal proceedings have been the utilisation of national languages of the republics and foreign access to justice. However, the authors of this paper hypothesise that citizens and organisations 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 such 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 conclusions 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.