Democracy and understandable justice. The clarification of legal discourse in Spain

Abstract

This paper deals with the modernization of the Spanish legal discourse and it comprises seven sections. In the first, we propose the relationship between the legal discourse and the historicity and literalness, which has led to the stagnation of such communicative language in all known traditions. In the second section, we present a brief overview and the current status of the clarification of this kind of discourse on the international scene. In the third one, we describe the situation of the legal discourse in Spain and, in particular, the initiative that has led to the publication of the Report of the Interministerial Commission for modernization of the legal discourse. In the fourth, we raise the sociological reasons that explain the need for a communicative change in the Justice Administration in Spain. The fifth section is devoted to describing one of the six academic researches that underpin this report, specifically, the longest and most comprehensive of them: Estudio de campo: el lenguaje escrito. The following section presents the ten most innovative contributions that this research brings and describes in some detail one of them, on the methodology used. In the last section we present some brief conclusions.