This site is a free public resource for lawyers, legal linguists, and anyone else interested in the language lawyers use. It continues my campaign of more than 40 years against legalese but is not restricted to the plain language v. legalese debate and will, I hope, promote effective legal writing.

Apart from information about (and links to) my own book and articles there is no advertising. An invisible web counter tells me which pages have been opened, and from which country and region, but not by whom. There are no other cookies.

The dates on the left indicate the most recent addition or improvement to each page.

I welcome ideas, examples (particularly of ambiguities in legal writing), and debate.

The 3rd edition of Clarity for Lawyers, co-authored with Daphne Perry, was published in October 2017. Its dedicated website has:


Recent news

My review of Christopher Williams' book The Impact of Plain Language on Legal English in the United Kingdom was published in the online journal English Language and Linguistics (Cambridge University Press) on 14 June 2023.