LES CONTRADICTIONS SYSTEMIQUES COMME SOURCES D’ACCESSIBILITE DIFFICILE DU LANGAGE JURIDIQUE
SYSTEMIC CONTRADICTIONS AS SOURCES OF A DIFFICULT ACCESSIBILITY OF LEGAL LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: Legal language is presented in the form of texts which are not easily accessible to the uninitiated persons. Yet some of these texts, such as the texts of laws, are of general use and concern everyone. Dependent on major works dealing with legal theory onlegal uncertainty and with French law-making practice, the paper tries to search for the systemic sources of this paradoxical situation using examples taken mainly from the French Civil Code. Stating that these contradictions which manifest themselves at language level are immanent to any legal order, from the opposition between precision and ambiguity of legal terms and concepts, through the conflict between their traditional or modern side, to the divergence between intelligibility and technicality of legal texts, the paper tries to identify the main systemic contradictions responsible for the limited accessibility of legal language at the level of both legal vocabulary and legal discourse.

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