Normalized Legal Drafting and the Query Method.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of language in law. The legal profession holds itself out to the public as expert in the art of communication through language, and yet, it is well known that there has been an old and continuing problem of using language effectively to communicate the mandates of the legal system. There is little quarrel with the twin propositions : (1) legal drafting is important, and (2) it is badly done now and needs to be improved. (See Appendix A.) The virtue of language normalization and its accompanying servant, the query method, is that they provide the seeds' for evolving both legal education and legal systems in the direction of more orderly expression of legal norms.