Legal linguistics has not been a transient interest for me. Along with examining the larger principles, I find myself deep in addictive details.
I particularly like the term legal pronoun, which gave a new name to a familiar issue. Legal pronoun refers to expressions like abovementioned and aforesaid, which could easily be omitted. According to Mattila‘s search, the Finlex data base can retrieve heaps of legal pronouns – for example, the abovementioned abovementioned is mentioned 1180 times. Legal pronouns are even more common in English.
Periodic sentences, on the other hand, include every detail of the topic in the same long sentence. Decisions from a court will summarize facts, exceptions, conditions and conclusions in a single sentence in hopes of avoiding misunderstandings. A two-page decision can consist of as few as two intricate sentences. In the past, these endless sentences were a measure of a judge’s professional skill, but today the periodic style is fortunately history.
The meaning of many words opened up in a new way for me thanks to Mattila’s Comparative Legal Linguistics. For example, emancipation was originally a Roman legal term which meant “the act by which one who was unfree or under the power and control of another, is set at liberty and made his own master”.