Law is written and spoken concisely. But not always. In 1751, a barrister, Luke Robinson, brought a case in which his pleadings ran to the equivalent of 2,000 sheets of paper. The case concerned a simple land dispute about an estate in Ellerton, Yorkshire, but Robinson widened his arguments to embrace diverse allegations including battery and false imprisonment against eight defendants.

The case failed. A second stab at the same action (3,000 sheets) also failed. The court eventually reduced the claim to a quarter of one page, found against Robinson, and ordered the then enormous costs against him of £1,000.

That case comes to mind when looking at last week’s Court of Appeal decision in R v Greaves. Wonderfully headed in The Times law reports “Bulk does not a case make”, the judgment explains why an appeal application from Claude Clifford Greaves failed. Greaves had been convicted of false accounting charges at Southwark Crown Court. His appeal was just a mass of papers whose thousands of points were entirely devoid of value.

In the Court of Appeal, Sir Igor Judge said the lack of merit in the application had to be “clawed out of the bulky papers”. He said that “complexity and bulk do not turn an unarguable application into one which is arguable”.

Using the computer printer as the engine of an appeal argument, as in the Greaves case, is inexcusable. None the less, law does sometimes demand the use of many words. In legal documents such as contracts, wills, and deeds, it is commonly necessary for expressions to be long and detailed in order to cover all the points and for the avoidance of doubt.

The same applies to legislation. The Companies Act 2006, for example, has 1,300 sections. The Act is 760 pages long. But it is not long-winded; it is just long. Company law, like inorganic chemistry or ancient Greek, is a complicated business.

Most of the law applicable today is old law. We can’t re-write the old law reports. That means we are still left with many examples of hangover verbosity. For example, historically, with a language fed by several distinct traditions, (such as Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French) it was often necessary to use couplings of words just to ensure that there could be no doubt what was meant. Hence you get orders to “cease and desist” (from French and Old French respectively).

Law is littered with coupled expressions which just say the same thing using two words with different origins such as “fit and proper”, “goods and chattels”, “peace and quiet” and “will and testament”.

Some legal speeches are notoriously long. On June 30, 2004, Gordon Pollock, QC, finished his opening speech in litigation against the Bank of England. The speech lasted for an incredible 79 days (minus breaks for sleeping). But then, not to be outworded, Nicholas Stadlen, QC, for the Bank of England, clocked up an opening speech running to 119 days. Don’t invite both of them to the same dinner party.

Most speeches, however, are of moderate length. In civil cases, for example, the civil procedure rules ensure that cases are dealt with “expeditiously and fairly”.

There are, though, ways in which law could be made more succinct. As, historically, lawyers and clerks were paid by the length of documents, padding them with unnecessary words became a common ruse. In the 17th-century, Chief Justice Hale said such scams served no other purpose than “to swell the attorney’s bill”. That doesn’t happen mischievously today but there are still many legal documents in fields such as property law and insurance which could be much plainer.

The great 19th-century jurist Jeremy Bentham opposed lawyers being verbose. He railed against the “principle of jargon” and against lawyers saying things like “to give extension to” instead of “to extend”. He condemned the long-windedness of statutes including one with a sentence 13 pages long (is it any wonder lawyers and law students are so garrulous?).

But, sensible as his ideas were, Bentham himself was something of a complicated character. He advocated the principle “the shorter the sentence the better” but did so in long sentences. One passage against verbosity begins:

“The nomenclature devised in a barbarous way, by mixture of stupidity, ignorance, error, and lawyer-craft, has, by force of irresistible power, under favour of interest-begotten and authority-begotten prejudice, been interwoven in the language, and...[zzzzzz and so on in one 147 word sentence]”

Prolixity is a particular challenge in the electronic age. Writing in 1963, the American lawyer David Mellinkoff noted that every mechanical aid the law has used has increased its bulk. With remarkable prescience, Mellinkoff said that in the age of “Electronic Data Retrieval” the ease of “feeding the machine”, will encourage a less discriminating reading and application of the law.

Today, much of what is available electronically, such as law reports, databases, archives and template documents are exceptionally useful. So it’s good to have judicial vigilance to ensure that the computer isn’t used by lawyers to let bulk pose as merit.

The fewer words the better. In 1627, one court nailed it in as few as a magnificent seven: “needless verbosity is the mother of difficulty”.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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