Laws should be written so that a citizen with an elementary school education is able to understand them. But is it always possible to write laws with such simple language? Are problems of understanding related to language or to content? Can those even be distinguished from each other? These questions are dealt with in the article How to Examine the Formation of Legal Text and its Genre Boundaries? by Salli Kankaanpää, Aino Piehland, Matti Räsänen.
The authors participated in the drafting of the Housing Companies Act and made 225 proposals to improve its readability. Which of the proposals were adopted? Most of them tried to make the wording less abstract and bring it closer to everyday language. Some proposals added information to make statements more understandable for laymen. The lawmakers approved half of the suggestions that made the language more concrete, but less than one-third of those adding further information.
Changes in structure were more acceptable than those related to vocabulary; perhaps the latter was seen as interfering with the content. But the law – like any other text – builds its meaning with language. It could well be that many improvements were rejected due to a narrow conception of language. As one legislator said of the original wording that seemed appropriately legalistic, “There’s nothing wrong with this text; it’s just that I don’t understand it.”