Courting change

First, it was off with the wigs that judges wore in the courts of England and Wales. From today, it is off with the unending string of ja...

First, it was off with the wigs that judges wore in the courts of England and Wales. From today, it is off with the unending string of jargon that tied Britannia8217;s institutions of justice into knots. For centuries, the law was rendered an ass to most of its denizens because of its weird anachronisms and stuffy Latinisms. But not any more, it seems. The Lord Chancellor8217;s Department has now decreed that the language of Her Majesty8217;s courts will be simple, straight and in keeping with the spirit of a more egalitarian age. Therefore, 8220;plaintiffs8221; will no longer file 8220;writs8221;, instead 8220;claimants8221; will file 8220;claim forms8221;. No longer will the 8220;leave of the court8221; be sought, but 8220;permission of the court8221; will be asked for.

No longer will people scratch their heads in dismay when faced with a 8220;Mareva injunction8221;, because they8217;ll know at once that 8220;an order to freeze a company8217;s assets8221; has been passed. And as for Latin terms like inter partes and ex parte, they have been quietly replaced by moreself-explanatory expressions in everyone8217;s English, like 8220;on notice of hearing8221; and 8220;without notice of hearing8221;.

The changes don8217;t come a day too soon. In fact, there have been many advocates of plainspeaking who have for decades been agitating for precisely such a revolution. It8217;s not just language usage that had bothered them. They perceived the social effects of such mystifying verbosity because it meant that many were rendered as outsiders in the judicial process just by virtue of not being able to understand the language it was clothed in. Today, an estimated 2,000 members of the Plain English Campaign will make themselves present in the courts to ensure that lawyers don8217;t exceed their language brief!

So where does all this leave India, once the brightest jewel in the Crown? As the once-faithful subjects of His Majesty, the country8217;s leadership and bureaucracy decided after independence to meekly and quite blindly replicate British institutions of justice, right down to the last writ, comma andfull stop. To this moment, business in most Indian courts is conducted in a language that is twice removed from the life of ordinary people 8212; not only is it largely in English, it is in an English very few understand. Today, even as Her Maj-esty8217;s subjects prepare to discard a legacy that has long outlived its use, India soldiers on with its 8220;subpoenas8221; and 8220;humble petitioners8221;. It8217;s not as if these questions haven8217;t been raised before in this country. In fact, in the seventies, both the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court Bar Association had attempted to argue that terms such as 8220;Your Lordship8221; reflected poorly on a country with democratic pretensions.

But administrative lethargy and lack of popular will seem to have ensured that this impulse towards a more equal order within the courts was as good as forgotten. The fact that England and Wales have now gone ahead and shed their excess verbal baggage should surely inspire this country to court change and change the courts.