One hundred and ninety-five words with only two semicolons, eight commas and one full stop to break it up. That is the kind of wordage an ordinary citizen summonsed before a magistrate for speeding will have to read in the law books to defend himself.
Bar Association chairman Philip Dykes yesterday begged for leniency for such offenders by calling on laws to be rewritten in language that is less of a 'triumph of Victorian syntactical engineering' and more easy for laymen - and lawyers - to understand.
'I have long marvelled at the capacity of Victorian draftsmen to manage to write clauses of bills without, so to speak, drawing breath for punctuation,' Mr Dykes told the legal community at the opening of the legal year yesterday.
'Many clauses written over a century ago to express the intention of lawmakers in Parliament made demands on the reader's powers of concentration which we, in the 21st century, are simply not up to. We ... no longer have the mental facilities to cope with multiple embedded subordinate clauses, parsimonious punctuation - full stops and colons seem to have been rationed until about 1920.'
Mr Dykes also cited section 31 of the Evidence Ordinance, declining to read it fully because 'we have all got homes to go to tonight'. The provision is a single sentence of 351 words with lots of commas but only one colon and one semicolon to take the strain, he said. 'It is a real challenge to short-term memory.'
He cited a Law Reform Commission report issued last month calling on evidentiary rules to be 'clear, simple, accessible and easily understood', and for a move away from 'opaque and confusing language' in the Evidence Ordinance.
