Investigates the complexity of legal language in Pakistan, suggesting improvements for public understanding.
The Pakistani legal system remains one of the most complex discourses for people outside the legal profession to access. Because the law affects the general public in its implementation and execution, the perceived lack of comprehensibility has been challenged by researchers. Hence, the present study explores the comprehensibility of Pakistani legal language using two studies. The first consists of a pilot study to investigate the level of comprehensibility among Pakistani professionals other than law professionals. It found that the language of the law is complex even for doctors and teachers. The second study explores lexical and syntactic features that contribute to the complexity of Pakistani legalese. This study identified different lexical and syntactical features in 15 Pakistani civil laws taken from different official government websites. The article concludes that although it is not possible to change the language of the law because of its nature, a guide can be provided for those laws that directly affect the general public.
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Kausar et al. (2026) studied this question.
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