A Pragmatic Reading of Procedural Discourses

Abstract

In this article, we examine the argumentation, conciseness, and clarity of legal briefs and judgments from the perspective of pragmatics.

The argumentation employed by lawyers (rhetorical and rational) produces the judgment, which fulfills the performative value of legal briefs according to the Theory of Speech Acts (Austin). The Principle of Cooperation and the conversational maxims (Grice), along with the Principle of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson), explain the concepts of conciseness and clarity.

With these theoretical references, we first analyzed judgments sanctioning the failure to meet the requirements of conciseness and clarity, which are general standards for procedural acts in administrative and civil law. Secondly, we examined a sample of texts focusing on linguistic clarity.

The judgments reveal that the failure to achieve conciseness results in the harshest sanction of inadmissibility due to insufficient information, rather than an excess of information, which at most leads to the loss or redistribution of legal costs. On the other hand, the failure to achieve clarity does not attract sanctions, as the obscurity of statements is never so severe as to prevent comprehension.

We evaluated the clarity of both legal briefs and judgments using the criteria set out in UNI Standard 11482:2013 on professional writing.

Since both types of texts are obscure for the same reason—namely, an unnecessary reliance on complex syntactic constructions (long sentences, frequent parenthetical clauses, etc.)—the clarity criteria remain invisible to judges. Consequently, they do not sanction the impact of obscurity, which is the time lost in re-reading—a result that the legal requirement seeks to prevent.