Zbornik Radova: Pravni Fakultet u Novom Sadu (Jan 2017)
The significance of language for law
Abstract
The form of a legal act is determined by the competent body that adopts it, the appropriate procedure in which it is adopted, and the form of the act in which it is adopted. The content of any legal act must be, at least at the level of apstraction and the content of the act, in line with the content of an act that has a higher legal force, either because of the higher position on the hierarchical scale of legal acts due to the competent body that adopts it, or because other act is of special nature and content and derogates this other. However, neither the respect of the requirements of the form, nor the printing of the contents of a legal act are possible without the use of language. In this paper, under the term 'language' we mean the ability of a man to communicate with other people in his own environment, through a special system of verbalized characters, thus forming his own thoughts into appropriate voice/ written messages. Language is also taken in this paper as communication between the legislator and other legal entities and citizens, in the form of orders, declarative statements, prohibition, etc. in such a way that the content being communicated is clear and understandable to the addressees, who are mostly not legally educated. Some authors consider that only lawyers emphasize the significance of the language for law, as well as the significance of language for the specific legal language and legal terminology, while linguists remain strictly within their own science, dealing with the structure of language, the types of words and often by defending the mother tongue from the influence of foreign words at all costs. We agree with the thought of Nikola Visković that it is necessary to study the life of law ,and parallel with this, we also must study the language, which plays a key role in the life of law. In this paper we deal with the views of (mostly domestic) lawyers on the importance of language for law during the second half of the 20th century, while having in mind, at the same time, the views of the most important domestic and foreign linguists on the same topic.
