To Use or Not to Use Shall: Current Debate on Shall in Legal Texts
To Use or Not to Use Shall: Current Debate on Shall in Legal Texts

Summary/Abstract: In the context of plain language efforts, shall in legal texts has been vigorously targeted and criticized for being archaic and ambiguous. Consequently, language planning experts have sought its complete suppression or a “disciplined use” in public and private legal documents and across jurisdictions. At the same time, appropriate substitutes have had to be found to replace shall, most of them posing certain difficulties. This paper outlines the current debate surrounding the use of shall in legal texts and discusses the substitution strategies deployed in the countries where shall has been removed from certain legal texts altogether or where it has been used only sporadically. The second part of the paper presents synchronic and diachronic corpus-based research into the use of shall in UK legislation, EU legislation, and British contracts (in comparison to Australian contracts) to find out to what extent the plain language efforts targeting shall have been successful in private legal documents and whether the substitutes deployed in legislation are of any use in private documents. The results show substantial differences across genres and jurisdictions. Overall, it appears that the term “modal revolution” coined by Christopher Williams aptly describes the current situation.

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