Change of style, change of mind: lawyers’ writing manners

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between style and epistemology as regards the discipline of law – especially in the Romanistic tradition – and, more specifically, its resistance to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on literary theory and discourse analysis literature, the first part of this paper examines the notion of ‘style’ in relation to academic disciplines. It argues that the variety of writing styles reflects the various epistemologies underlying the different disciplinary discourses and makes interdisciplinarity difficult to implement in general. The second part of this study borrows Roland Barthes's distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts in order to show that lawyers’ writing manners hinder the ability of law to connect with other disciplines. Against the background of the two sections, this contribution will finally include a discussion on what could be done to enhance law(yers)’s capability for interdisciplinary thinking, concluding that style might be not so insignificant a place to start with.

Conceptualising ‘style’ in legal scholarship: the curious case of Zweigert's ‘style doctrine’

“…Ultimately, it seems implausible to argue that it was among Zweigert's academic ambitions to provide a systematic stylistic analysis of law, similar to Triepel's (or Ewald's or Legrand's or Schlag's). As far as his scholarship can be seen as an early example of informal interdisciplinarity, it displays some of the arguably attractive features of this writing manner, identified by Alexandra Mercescu (2019). But these are best seen as unfulfilled promises.…”