Linguistic clarity of court decisions: the problem of accessibility of legal language for citizens
Abstract
The article examines the problem of linguistic clarity of court decisions as an important condition for ensuring accessibility of justice and effective legal communication in the modern legal system of Ukraine. It is emphasized that court decisions perform not only a regulatory and legal function, but also a communicative function aimed at informing and ensuring understanding of their content by all participants in legal relations. It has been established that a significant part of court texts is characterized by complex syntactic constructions, excessive terminology, clericalism and insufficient structural transparency, which complicates their perception by both specialists and ordinary citizens. Such linguistic organization of the text creates communication barriers that can lead to misinterpretation of court decisions, a decrease in the level of trust in the judiciary, and a complication of the exercise of the right to effective protection. The paper substantiates that linguistic clarity is an integrative category of legal discourse, which combines clarity, accessibility and logical structuring of the text, ensuring a balance between legal accuracy and communicative efficiency. The main linguistic factors that reduce the level of clarity of judicial decisions are analyzed, syntactic overload, nominalization, terminological redundancy and weak explicitness of logical connections. It is proved that the problem of linguistic clarity is interdisciplinary in nature and goes beyond the limits of purely linguistic analysis, since it is directly related to the principles of accessibility of justice and the rule of law. Special attention is paid to the need to adapt Ukrainian judicial practice to European standards of understandable legal speech. As a result of the study, directions for improving legal writing aimed at increasing the transparency and accessibility of judicial decisions are proposed. Keywords: linguistic clarity, court decisions, legal discourse, access to justice, legal communication, plain language.