701. Legal English with Louise Kulbicki [Text Video]

luke's english podcast is completely free you're welcome but i need to pay my way somehow in this life and you can help me do that in several ways one is that you can send a donation of your choice just click a donate button on my website and it's all done through paypal so that's one way of doing it the other thing you can do is sign up to luke's english podcast premium for the price of a nice coffee from you to me every month you can access over 100 episodes devoted to helping you improve your vocabulary first of all because arguably vocabulary is the most important aspect of developing rich fluent varied and appropriate english so 100 episodes vocabulary is one of the main things but also grammar and crucially pronunciation the episodes are available on your phone in the luke's english podcast app but also on the website with pdf downloads and everything to find out all of the relevant information about luke's english podcast premium and to sign up just go to teacherluke.comuk slash premium info okay so now that i've said that we can get started and here's the jingle [Music] you're listening to luke's english podcast for more information visit teacherloop.co.uk hello and welcome back to the podcast i hope you're doing all right today as you listen to this today's episode is all about legal english and it's a conversation with a legal english and law trainer called louise kilbicki from the uk legal english yes and let me stop you right there if you think that this might be boring or just not for you for whatever reason just stop there for a second you could learn some seriously useful bits of english and general knowledge from listening to this and i assure you that this will be more interesting than you expect that's my luke's english podcast promise this will be more interesting than you expect with more than just law but the human stories and cases that formed some of the most important legal concepts in england and wales law underpins so much of what we do that it's everywhere all the time defining the parameters of the world in which we live also the world of law uses language very specifically it's very valuable stuff for you to learn i think during the conversation that you're going to hear we managed to cover a lot of the main concepts in law the sorts of things that you would study if you took a legal english course both louise and i have taught legal english courses in the past in fact louise does that more regularly these days than i do um but we've both taught we both have experience of teaching legal english courses so a lot of the things that we say here come from the things that we do in classes when we teach our courses this could almost be like the introductory part of a course in legal english that you might take online or something but it's it's not of course it's a free episode of my podcast but i would certainly say that a lot of the things a lot of the vocab a lot of the concepts that come up in this conversation are definitely things you could make a list of them and you would find all of those items listed in a word list for you know any half-decent legal english course so um yes it's a bit like the introductory part of a legal english course a little bit of information about louise who you're going to be hearing me in conversation with so louise studied law at university and got both bachelor's and master's degrees in law specializing in environmental law in fact after campaigning for environmental law reform in london and abroad she moved to brazil and ultimately decided to go into legal english language teaching and set up what i think is the only legal english podcast available at the moment luis's podcast is called study legal english i think it's it's it's actually called the study legal english podcast with louise colbicki and it covers all sorts of different areas relating to the english that you would need to operate in the world of law i've always been fascinated by how english combines with the world of law and law making and so i thought it would be interesting to talk to louise about legal english what it is how we use it and what some of the most important terms topics and cases are i've always wanted to explore legal english to some extent on this podcast it's just taken me 700 episodes to finally get to it personally i learned to teach legal english at the london school of english and i developed many important teaching skills on those courses as well as tons of general knowledge about the world it was probably the english course that i learned the most from as a teacher law is not just about rules it's about stories of people who have problems finding solutions to those problems and analyzing the situation as fairly as possible it's about managing relationships between people and creating a framework that works for everyone but stories are the thing and you'll get a few stories in this episode including what happens when you find a dead snail in your bottle of ginger beer the key difference between a biscuit and a cake and how mickey and minnie mouse are sadly getting a divorce after all these years plus important legal concepts relating to those things including here's a little list okay here's the contents page anyone who's done a legal english course will recognize a lot of these things so here are the main points differences between solicitors and barristers these are two types of lawyer in england and wales solicitors and barristers what are the differences we talk about words that mean something different between general english and legal english jurisdictions these are different systems different legal systems in different places and differences in language between those jurisdictions we talk about learning legal concepts as you learn the language and how the two are kind of go together elements to a contract so if you're doing business with someone you need some kind of contract what are the different elements that make that contract legal or valid including the idea of consideration which we will explain in due course also we talk about civil law systems versus common law systems some entertaining old cases there's the one about the snail which deals with things like tort law negligence and the duty of care principle there's a short history of the english language since 1066 and how this affects modern legal english the concept of doublets this is when two words which mean the same thing are used together and this is quite common in legal english like for example the phrase null and void i don't know if you're familiar with that phrase null and void but that's just an example of two words that mean the same thing but for some reason in legal english they're both used together there's a few more examples of that and also there's the case of the jaffa cakes jaffa cakes yum yum yum those delicious cakes that you might get in the shop certainly in england or in the uk jaffa cakes oh yes please but are they in fact cakes or not are they biscuits or are they cakes they sort of look like biscuits we eat them like biscuits but maybe they're cakes and so are jaffa cakes cakes or biscuits and why is this important get your pen and paper out for this one there's a ton of stuff to learn we recorded this conversation in the weeks leading up to christmas of last year 2020 louise was working in oman providing legal english training courses to people there and so this is where we join our conversation with me in paris and louise in oman how many legal concepts words and phrases can you notice and learn from this conversation we will see also there is a subtitles video for this episode on youtube i've been making these subtitle videos or text videos in which you can read a transcript in nice clear big font on the screen as you listen so go to my youtube channel and you'll find this full episode with nicely presented subtitles in a nice big font on the screen that's a new thing i've been doing recently the plan is to do that with all my episodes and also some of the episodes from the archive that's a new thing so you can read the full transcript as you listen if you want to that's on my youtube channel and if you check it out don't forget to smash that like button okay guys don't forget to like and subscribe which obviously everyone implores you to do if they ever go if you ever go onto youtube but please do it as well on my account it helps the algorithms algorithm seems to like it mr rhythm or al algorithm yeah algorithm yeah was that a joke sort of anyway never mind let's just keep going so anyway like and subscribe okay guys don't just tap the like button i want you to smash that like button because that's the youtube way isn't it so there should also be a full transcript for this episode available on the episode page on my website which is also free it's quite generous of me isn't it anyway without any further ado let's get started and let's meet my guest louise colbicki from the study legal english podcast and here we go [Music] louise hello hi luke thank you for inviting me on your show you're welcome thanks for coming on how are you today yes i'm i'm good i'm feeling a little bit sleepy because i've had a difficult working week but yes very good and excited to be here what time is it where you are it's two o'clock um i'm i'm in oman in muscat and yeah it's sunny outside and very very different to i imagine where you are in in paris mid mid morning yeah it's about 11 a.m the sky is grey and overcast it's quite chilly i always feel i have to do a weather report for some reason at the beginning of these conversations typical british yeah small talk yes so how would you describe yourself now are you a legal english trainer is that the sort of your main job description today yeah yeah i guess yeah i'd say yeah that's about right like a legal a legal english and law trainer i would say so i i wonder if it's worth just briefly mentioning the the two main career paths for someone training to be a lawyer in in england and wales which would be to be either become a solicitor or to become a barrister you chose not to do those things can we maybe just talk about what what the difference is very briefly yeah and why didn't you want to do either of those things yeah sure so a solicitor is a type of lawyer who does traditionally it does more transactional work like contract drafting and work that involves clients outside of court like setting up a company for a client or something like that whereas a barrister traditionally is a type of lawyer that presents in court and the kind of lawyer that if you ever watch legal dramas and you kind of see the figure with the wig and the gown like wig is fake hair for listeners who don't know what it is and a robe is kind of like an outfit that harry potter would wear those are the barristers and yeah they so they have different training so the lawyer sorry the solicitor would do a law degree and then a short course called the legal practice course and then go on to do training within a law firm and the barrister does a law degree and then does a short course and then they do something called a pupillage which is where they kind of train in what we call chambers which is these the where barristers work basically so traditionally there's been more of a distinction between the two but nowadays a lot of solicitors also do present in court they do litigation but they don't automatically have what we call rights of audience in certain courts they have to take like an exam to do it yeah why didn't i do it basically i i don't know just at the so when i was studying i wanted to use the law in some way but i just wasn't i didn't see when i did it work experience in law firms i did them in very corporate environments and i guess at that time i just felt like that wasn't quite where i fitted in you know if listeners watched legal dramas like suits or things like that it was kind of like that environment and i just felt like oh this is just a bit too corporate for me it could be very very competitive it can be very tough being a solicitor or yeah i mean solicitor is i think the one that most people go for i think there are more solicitors than barristers so yeah very corporate environments either you're going to be working in a company in the legal department in that kind of corporate world in in london maybe or you're going to work in a law firm working for partners it's really tough and very demanding and yeah it might it's not everyone's cup of tea yeah that i guess that's what i felt and um like now now that i'm so because i i run the study legal english podcast and so i i speak to like a lot of a lot of lawyers and um i can see that you know that is the kind of perception that we have but there are some firms that are doing really interesting stuff that kind of more you know regular people and you know it's it's not just i guess being a solicitor is not just always that particular corporate thing but i guess being a naive young person i had i had an idea of what it was and it just it just didn't fit now i'm like why didn't i do that i could have been rich [Laughter] you mean you're not rich being a legal english teacher i mean like i'm just working really long hours and some of the top lawyers they get obscene amounts of money i'm just like wow yeah could have retired by now let's talk about legal english then let's let's focus on that now so well this may be an obvious question but it's probably an important one what is legal english and how is it actually different to the english that we're just using now good question so yeah so legal english is the language that lawyers or legal professionals use when they are doing their work so it could be when they're drafting contracts like we've mentioned or when they are presenting in court or speaking with clients and legal english yeah it's it's it's like a niche area of english because it's got its own vocabulary it's got its own collocations it's got its own sentence structures or you know specific times when we can use different sentence structures like the active and passive voice and i guess like you've mentioned it's kind of difficult to separate legal english from the law obviously because what you're doing is very often vocabulary embodies these legal concepts that have been developed through the legal system and so if you're learning legal english then you're also inevitably learning about the law and the legal system and so it's also difficult because all legal systems are different and you know even even within the united kingdom we've got three jurisdictions which for listeners who are unsure what a jurisdiction is a jurisdiction is an area or like a country or an area of land that has its own legal system so in england in the uk sorry we've got the jurisdiction of england and wales scotland and northern ireland so if you're thinking of going and studying the law in the uk and you go and choose to go and study in edinburgh then you're actually going to be studying scottish law not not english law so so you know all of the differences when you're studying if you study regular english and you learn words in british english and then you try to speak to an american they'll be like what do you what do you what do you mean by um that it's the same with with legal english you know we've got we've got words that exist in in english legal english from england that don't exist in american english like we use should we consider some examples there yeah yeah sure so in terms of american and english legal english in england we say the claimant and in america they say the plaintiff which means do you know this luke i remember i remember are you going to test me now see go on remember correctly so in a legal case let's say listeners oh we need a little example let's say that as uh the copyright holder of the intellectual property that let's say i'm the owner of the intellectual property rights to what would it be luke's english podcast okay incorporated it's a company and i discover that someone else has basically copied my idea they've stolen my essence and i feel like they you know that i have a legal claim to make i would take that person to court so as the person taking the other one to court i'm making a claim the claim would be they've stolen my ideas then i would be the claimant i'd be the one bringing the the case to the court very good you've got full marks you clearly know your stuff link so yeah so that's an example but we used to in england we used to use the word plaintiff but as i've previously mentioned this idea of the plain english approach in england in 1999 there were some changes to what we call the civil procedure rules which are the rules that govern which kind of you know they control how a court case a civil court cases is conducted and the language there was this big shift towards using more natural language so instead of plaintiff we we now use claimant because it's the person who brings the claim it's the person who has the complaint so it kind of sounds more more natural it's more understandable so in england we use claimant in the us they use plaintiff another one if you watch a lot of legal dramas you might hear the words motion like i can't do an american accent but you know somebody like the bringing emotion to the cause in england we use application which sounds much more natural and basically a motion or an application is an oral or a written request that's made to the court or the judge just asking them to give a ruling or to give an order on a particular topic so it's basically asking the judge to to do something and then another one is that we there's a word called subpoena which sounds like what on earth is that that's never gonna guess what that is so common to hear that though in in in films and tv shows like you know mickey mouse was subpoenaed in front of the supreme court on friday yeah yeah subpoena yeah mickey mouse yeah it's just the first thing i thought of i don't know maybe minnie mouse and mickey mouse are going to get a divorce and the the the divorce is getting very messy and there's all sorts of other private um cases being brought in front of courts and then supreme courts and appeal courts and it's mickey and minnie are just absolutely dragging each other through the dirt here it's it's terrible johnny depp it's like a johnny depp amber heard situation yeah anyway so yeah so a subpoena yeah you're right we hear it a lot in legal dramas in american legal dramas and in england we call it witness summons which maybe sounds a bit more natural but you'll probably you know if you haven't heard those words before you might still be like what does that mean and luke have you got anything oh okay yeah okay i reckon i can have a go at this so listeners you know what a witness is that someone who has you know got evidence to to give in in a case in court for example you know donald duck could be the could be the witness you know if if there are claims that mickey mouse has been i don't know abusive in the in the marriage then maybe donald duck might be brought in as a witness so he would be summoned to the court so to summon someone it's basically to request that they come somewhere so it's like you've been summoned to appear in court it's basically saying come here that's what a summons is it says come here come to the court please very good you you clearly know your stuff so yeah so that's kind of a taster of the difference between american and in legal english from england and then we i mean i i could talk a little bit about kind of some of the differences between regular english and legal english would you like me to talk a little bit about that yes please yeah okay so you asked at the beginning is legal english fun and i was like not sure about that i'm gonna make demonstrate a few fun words in regular english general words which are fun general words which when we take them into legal english they become a little bit less fun so regular english the word bar what do you think luke when you think of a bar so a bar meaning a place where you can buy a drink yeah right and so let's see so okay so in legal english it's probably going to explicitly describe the purpose of the of the establishment so it's probably going to be something like a beverage procurement premises or something like that that's a good so you've given me a quite a different answer to the one that i was i was looking for but you're quite right if for example you were writing a contract and you had to define what the bar is you wouldn't just say oh it's the place to get a drink you might get a lawyer that tries to use some obscure writing like the beverage premises or whatever you said there um beverage procurement premises yeah which i think is not something that people actually would use i'm just going down to the beverage procurement premises i've been summoned i've been summoned to the beverage procurement premises could i get you some liquid that may quench your thirst um so we do have lawyers you know defining terms like that in in contracts but we also the bar is a specific word in legal english which in england refers to the legal profession of barristers and that's in england but in america it refers to you know you get the bar association which is not this fun association where you which is full of bars where you can go drinking it's the association of lawyers basically so that's that's the first one i see you mean so we've got bar in general english meaning a place to get a drink and but and bar in legal english means like when you when you actually plead in court right so for example that's why it's a barrister because of the bar in barrister means it's someone who is at the bar meaning that they are sort of at a it's almost like being at a counter but not to get a drink but because you're trying to talk to a judge yeah actually the origin of the word i believe comes from the fact that in court there's a bar that that that basically separates the legal professionals from the judge and the members of the public so i think it probably has something to do with that so this this idea of the bar separating legal professionals from from regular people but yeah it relates to the legal profession of barristers and then i we've got another very fun word in regular english which is party what's a party luke a party is a place where you would imbibe uh those liquid beverages that we purchased potentially at a bar or maybe at another outlet of some kind a party yeah it's a place where you go and have fun with your friends and dance to music and you know have a drink and stuff like that's a party isn't it yeah yeah something we're all missing like during yes wednesday we're all like come on let's let's get to the party but in legal english it means something less fun it generally refers to something else any ideas link so i guess a party in legal english would be a person or maybe a company which is involved in a legal claim or a legal dispute in court so if it's if if we go back to this maybe we shouldn't but i'm going to anyway because i can't think of any other examples at this point the the the case of mickey mouse versus minnie mouse that those are the two parties involved you've got uh mickey mouse on one side and minnie mouse on the other side it's a very sad case but two those are the two parties in the case exactly exactly so so yeah so those are some examples of you get regular english of course you know a huge amount of words and then there are a lot of words that are regular english words that have a totally different meaning in legal english so part of learning legal english is part of partly learning learning those words and sometimes learning those words does mean also learning legal concepts another example would be consideration which is in general english it's like you know a careful or kind thought with you know to be considerate to be thoughtful to have consideration for people and yeah like like when you buy someone a christmas present you have you know you need a lot of careful consideration to to get the right gift so it's like careful thinking being thoughtful yes being considerate and can you know consideration is the now but but yeah but then in and yeah i'm trying to be considerate in my christmas shopping at the moment but then in legal english consideration is this element to form a binding contract it's like this concept that if you give something for example you said i'll sell you my car and i say okay and then i give you some you know i would give you money in exchange for the car basically so that it's i should hope so yeah how much what kind of car have you got i've got a mini a mini cooper i should let you know that it's it's it's a toy though i don't i should have probably stated that before anyway anyway i don't have a car but if i did have a car i would have a mini cooper let's say nice nice so within that idea of consideration to understand the word you need to understand the law of contract because you're understanding what does it actually mean to form a binding contract so it's kind of difficult to separate the law and concepts of the law from from the language by the way sorry we should just clarify what consideration is then in in terms of contract law so consideration would be the thing that is exchanged or some element of exchange right so in a legal contract of the sale of a car you're buying the mini cooper and in exchange i get some money so if there's no if there's no money written into the contract there's no sense of exchange then there's no consideration in the contract exactly yeah yeah good point to clarify and i think the courts have said that even if it was just like one pound it could still be deemed as as valid consideration it still could be thought of as valid consideration one thing is being exchanged for something else it's not just a one-way one-way thing because a one-way thing is it's not a contract so it can't be it can't be legally binding if it doesn't comply with the rules of what a contract is and one of those rules is there must be an element of consideration if you want the contract to stand up in court if you want to be able to make a claim against someone for not fulfilling the duties of the contract then the contract has to be legal in the first place so that and consideration is one of the key aspects of making a contract legal exactly what what i would say is that it's kind of like a bit of an abstract thing and that even though this concept exists in most jurisdictions it exists in most legal systems in some kind of form but in reality in commercial contracts there's always going to be consideration because you know businesses generally are going to want money for their goods or services yeah it's very it's very rare i expect that there is a contract drawn up and then you know the lawyers are like wait a minute there's no consideration in this contract of course there is almost always consideration because that's business exactly exactly i mean these concepts are linked to especially with legal english they're they're linked to the development of our english legal system which is quite peculiar in the fact that it's a common law system which is a a system whereby we have law which is made by judges and that we follow and that we get the rules from from this case law as well as written statutes or acts of parliament which are the written laws whereas in other jurisdictions you know a lot a lot of jurisdictions are civil law jurisdictions where they have just all written down code and so the ideas that we follow in england they've kind of developed over years and years and years and from you know literally the beginning of the common law which was 1066 and you know so they've they've developed from these you know these times when maybe bobby mcbob face or i was trying to think i was trying to think of like a medieval name but um bob bobby bobby the elder that's better that's better so bobby the elder you know wanted to sell his land to poppy davey the younger davey the younger and they made some kind of oral agreement about selling the land but then i forgot what the name was johnny the younger yeah okay why not johnny the younger didn't provide any any money or anything in return and then they had to decide whether this was a valid contract or not and so this idea of consideration and providing something in exchange for something developed yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean often these things it's just so like absolute basic common sense like yeah of course if i'm gonna sell you a car you know i would expect to get something in return it's absolute basic common sense but even the most basic common sense principles have to be explicitly written into into law in some way it's interesting what you said i think it's just sort of worth mentioning that again about the english and welsh legal system which is based on yeah common law a combination of cases case law judgments by judges based on specific cases that become legal precedent and and laws that are written by parliament so it's kind of a combination of those things so i guess as a as a as a lawyer as a solicitor well a solicitor might spend a lot of time looking through cases and this is previous judgments made by judges based on two people who who were in a disagreement and what the judge decided that then becomes like a binding legal principle going forwards so it's a combination of those cases and laws written by parliament written by the the government yes yeah and so there are quite a few common law jurisdictions out there and you know generally it comes from the the british empire a lot of common law countries when the uk when when we went and tried to take over countries i'm sorry everybody for our uh colonial past but there's yeah you know so there are a lot of common law countries out there and you know america india new zealand um there's a lot of countries in the caribbean that are common law systems that have this this concept of case law and that also it makes i mean i said studying law is a little bit boring but studying common law is probably a bit more interesting than just studying civil codes because you get to study the facts of cases and sometimes there can be some some interesting cases a bit like the one that you made up with minnie and mickey mouse i've never heard of that case but there's cases that are kind of like fun and they involve real people or real companies and so it kind of breathes a bit of life into the law whereas in a civil country you might just be reading codes which could maybe be a little bit boring yeah yeah big books full of illegal codes so just can i just sort of recap just to help people because i'm sure that listen people listening to this who aren't lawyers and who have no experience of law or legal english may be a bit lost so we were talking about first of all differences in legal language between different jurisdictions so for example england and america and the differences there and also differences between just general english and the sorts of legal english that we use in england and wales and talking about how when you start to learn the vocabulary you also start to learn about the legal concepts and those legal concepts could be for example concepts in contract law like the idea of consideration but also things like the english and welsh legal system which is based on you know previous cases and also statutes from the government so that's interesting and also one of the things that makes learning english learning legal english more interesting is getting into examples and specific cases and there are some cases that as you say are actually quite entertaining i remember one of the cases that we used to do oh is it donohue versus someone oh yeah donahue vs stevenson donahue versus stevenson is that the one with the snail yeah yeah do you want me to say that do you remember the facts i know the basics but you can do it because it's probably a bit fresher in your mind yeah so basically um donahue went to i'm trying to think of whether donahue was the actual woman or whether it was her friend i think it was the actual woman so i can find out maybe yeah so basically a lady went to a bar basically or a cafe and she her friend ordered her a ginger beer and that i think they ordered like some kind of dessert which was ice cream with ginger beer poured over it or something like that and when she received her dessert she had this kind of opaque bottle of ginger beer which means that you can't see through it it's just this glass bottle like you know like a bottle of wine you'll get and you can't see what's in the bottom wait a minute an opaque this is a key word this is absolutely a key word in this case opaque which is the opposite of transparence exactly so if something is opaque it means you can't see through it like like a mug like uh the sort of mug that you would use to drink your coffee from i norm like a luke's english podcast mug is i've got one here can you hear that listeners yeah english podcast mug is opaque you can't see through it whereas a wine glass is transparent it's not opaque so the key thing here is that the bottle of ginger beer that it's actually donahue it's mrs donohue she ordered the the bottle of ginger beer and it was in an opaque bottle so the people serving the ginger beer weren't able to see what was inside and so right is it is it that mrs donahue was the one who drank it or was it that was it that was her friend i needed um hold on a minute no donahue's the one who drank the ginger beer okay so donahue she she had this dessert with the ginger beer poured over it and as she was pouring the rest of it over you know she'd already eaten some of it this decomposed foul disgusting snail dropped off plonked itself onto her dessert and you know she was horrified and her friend was horrified and you know she also so she suffered from gastroenteritis i think some kind of like problem very severe problem with her stomach anyway she tried to take a case to court and it was she didn't have a contract with the with the owner of the cafe because she hadn't bought the ginger beer herself her friend had bought the ginger beer for her so the courts were kind of trying to be trying to understand and she was trying to claim that she would be due compensation for her for her injury but because there wasn't a contract they couldn't she couldn't yeah in contract law so instead they this it's kind of like the foundation of tort law which is an area of law which is kind of where there's a duty of care between people for example like a shop owner and the people in in the store to to make sure that they are safe and cared for and if they're negligent what we call negligent which is they fail to uphold that duty then the person who is harmed can get compensation through what we call tort law so it was kind of like one of the most i mean it was a you know port the poor lady with her snail she managed to get compensation in the end through this by developing this concept of negligence in taurt so that's basically it is that what you remember luke yeah absolutely yeah it was it was a way to teach taught law and yeah taught i always found it quite difficult to to define it it's a civil wrong so it's something other than breach of contract so in private cases so okay listeners let's say we've got criminal law on one side and we i think we understand criminal law is when crimes have been committed and and so on but then there are also like cases between individuals where it's not the crown prosecution service or the police let's say that are prosecuting but instead it's individuals prosecuting each other in the private sphere and on what basis can these individuals take each other to court or claim things against each other i say individuals it could be someone like donahue mrs donohue and the owner of the cafe okay that kind of those are the parties that which the kind of parties we're talking about here so on what basis can they have legal disagreements with each other it could be based on contract as we've said so and contracts are just you know when basically one person says do you want this and the other person goes yes please and then they actually pay for it and the things are exchanged and and the people are at the right age and and that becomes a contract but in this case as you said louise mrs donahue didn't buy the ginger beer herself so there was no actual contract in place so on what legal basis can a claim be made and this is where we are in the zone of tort law which is about yeah some kind of mis what would be that misdoing some wrongdoing and yes and it's their basic principles in taught law and one of them is what duty of care and negligence so yeah so so i guess i always tr i always gave the example in school in in when i was teaching these things of the uh staircase in our school and we had very a very steep staircase to go down into the classrooms where we used to teach these classes and there was a a handrail attached to the wall right and that handrail wasn't always there very old building it was kind of a new handrail anyway the point is that the owners of the building have a duty of care over anyone who is actually using the building in a reasonable way for example going up and down the stairs to get from the classroom to the kitchens or the toilets or something so yes the owners of the building have a duty of care to make sure that it's reasonably safe and that includes things like putting a handrail on the wall or maybe a little you know watch out for the step little sign or adding rubber to the steps so that people don't slip that would all be done because of principles in tort law which say that you've got to look after the people who are using your building right yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly and that's like in in england and america there's this idea of that we have a sioux culture when so if you ever go on holiday in england you might and you go into a supermarket and you see that there's a sign that says you know careful there is water on the ground don't slip the reason for that sign is because of taut law because the supermarket does not want to be liable if you slip over in the supermarket they want to show that they've taken the care to tell you that there's there's water on the floor and you know if you're so stupid that you can't see it and you're gonna slip over you can't sue us because you know in in taught and um it's because of it's because of this concept of negligence and the duty of care and so yeah that's kind of one reason why we have everywhere in england you might see like you know signs saying be careful watch your head yeah and and i i've i've met students before who've commented on that like going on the london underground even lawyers on the law course we used to go to visit the law courts we used to go to the inns of court and stuff like that you know fascinating trips and we'd be on the train and you know i can remember people saying to me why are there so many signs telling people what to do everywhere and it's like please do this please do that be careful of this remember to that remember to do that mind the gap you know constantly being told and they felt like it was very patronizing like just you're constantly being instructed and treated like a like a child all the time like do this be careful of that but it's because of these legal principles which basically yeah these these companies or the underground network are basically saying all right we told you it's not our fault if you fall and kill yourself okay we we gave you fair warning so you can't sue us for it exactly exactly exactly whereas in a lot of other countries this concept would be written and very well defined in a civil code in england it kind of developed through the courts so it kind of developed in this slightly different way it was it was clear that there was a gap in the law where you know that owners of premises doctors conducting surgery people in positions of responsibility had to ensure that their premises or their actions were safe for those that they were providing services or products for and so the courts kind of developed that concept but you know it was quite a broad concept and then gradually it kind of gets refined in different cases but yeah it's all linked to how our how the jurisdiction of england and wales and the law and the common law has developed over the years and i wanted to mention another point about how the law has developed and how the the language has developed as well because i think this could be interesting for listeners and also you being in france might be interesting for you as well and so basically the i kind of mentioned that the the origins of the common law date back to 1066 which is every english person or every person from the uk knows what 1066 means luke what do you think of when you hear 1066 1066 is of course when the normans invaded england and william the conqueror and his norman army sailed across the english channel and attacked at hastings on the south coast southwest coast yeah and there was a big battle and the norman army which is basically i mean french although in those days it was probably not exactly french but normandy is you know northern part of france so it's when the french or normans invaded england killed our king an arrow he got an arrow in the eye he must have hurt and so from from that point forward we had a norman monarch on the throne william the conqueror and he he it was a very important figure and a lot of big reforms happened in our country at that point lots of castles were built like for example the tower of london i think was built by william the conqueror but i expect also it had a huge different a huge impact on our court system and all that stuff and also it's probably one of the reasons why there's a lot of french in uh english now especially formal english exactly exactly so yeah you've given a very good introduction to it so 1066 william the conqueror he took over england and what happened was prior to this we did not have a unified legal system it was all local laws being applied quite sporadically quite randomly very very local and what william the conqueror did was start to establish the common law which is the law which is common to everyone he had judges which went round the country trying to apply the same principles all the way around the country and what happened was french as you mentioned you know why do we have so many french words in in english or french origin words and especially in formal english french was the language of the court but of course english was the language of the people and so what lawyers did was they had to use two words instead of one because they had to use the french word for the court or for the official legal concept and they had to use english for the lay people the regular people the people they were representing so what's happened in legal english is that there are lots of what we call doublets which is these two words which mean the same thing being used together where we could just use one word and i'll give you an example of that there's there's a phrase that's called that's used which is indemnify and hold harmless which is like oh what does that mean sounds very complicated to indemnify and hold harmless it basically means to compensate someone for a loss it's to compensate to provide money for that problem that was suffered and it's used in specific instances but basically indemnify comes from the french it's got french origin and hold harmless has an english origin and nowadays what a lot of people are trying to promote people who are interested in using plain english principles is the idea that you know you shouldn't use two words where you can use one you could just use indemnify instead of indemnify and hold harmless because basically those two words mean the same thing so yeah legal english is full of these legal doublets and it's it's funny because sometimes you get people trying to and this is of course what lawyers are great at doing they try to argue that these words have different meanings but to justify the use of of these kind of long complex phrases but actually there's a lot of writers out there and lawyers out there who also equally argue the argue the opposite yeah the example of null and void springs to mind exactly so for example if two parties have had a contract together but for some reason they've decided to stop doing business and so the con contract needs to be cancelled let's say after all the legal work's been done and the contract is stopped then in legal language you might say that the contract is null and void but those two words mean the same thing exactly yes so what why use two words to mean the same thing it seems unnecessary and i guess would be from french and void maybe that is more of an anglo-saxon word than yeah void it could be i'm not sure because sometimes sometimes it's the case that you get doublet which have origin in both french and english so i i'm not sure about null and void null yeah definitely sounds french i don't know about void void sounds it sounds quite germanic to me yeah yeah i think you're probably right so learning the language of the law is like you know you have to learn and understand those expressions but then also understanding that the the modern trend is towards using a more plain language approach not just it's not just a trend it's it's it's a duty for english solicitors actually to in the code of conduct they are which is the code that regulates solicitors professional behavior they are obligated to communicate in a way that is understandable to to clients and and then of course you know we've got the civil procedure rules which show that there's been a shift in court language in england from you know plaintiff to claimant to more plain uh english equivalence and so you know it's not just a trend it's kind of like there's a there's a push a shift towards using to thinking more about the language that we're using in legal english and trying to make it more understandable but of course you need to understand you've got to understand these kind of legalese words and it doesn't just mean using a natural language there are different principles that apply to it but clearly there are certain words uh vocabulary collocations for example in legal english that we use that you need to learn as well and for example like we don't say we say break the law but we don't say break the contract we say breach the contract and we don't say to break a right we say to infringe or to violate a right so you know legal english has its own kind of words and vocabulary and it's knowing when to use them and and how to use them correctly yeah because obviously the business of law or the practice of law is about making very specific distinctions in order to be absolutely explicit and absolutely clear in order to prevent misunderstandings which can lead to you know bitter conflicts and things like that it's about clarifying things so everyone knows exactly where they stand and exactly what's being agreed and all that sort of thing so specifics are very important i was just going to mention about the plain english movement but it's also arguably a sort of an ethical push as well on ethical grounds because what can happen in law i think is that lawyers become so specialist and they end up using specialist language legalese as you said that it can become so specialist that ordinary lay people can't understand it at all and because of that advantage that legal people can have that that allows them to exploit non-legal people and for example charge even more money to explain things and you know what i mean that like having access to such specific terminology can actually be sort of a barrier for ordinary people and this can lead to sort of lawyers exploiting people and stuff like that so it's about opening it out and trying to make it more accessible while also maintaining the basic functions that legal english needs to have definitely definitely i i always i try to emphasize when i do my training but you can be very professional using the language correctly that doesn't mean that you have to overdo it intelligent professionals don't need to prove that they are that by using big words so i think in certain situations it could lead to kind of exploitation and going back to the thing that you said you mentioned about how part of being a lawyer is to express yourself in a clear way and to make sure that disagreements don't happen about meanings of words and things like that you brought to mind this case that i wanted to mention uh yeah it's a fun case and it involves very tasty jaffa cakes yum yum yum okay what what are jaffa cakes this needs to be explained first this needs to be a defined term doesn't it in this case what a jaffa cake is maybe this is the whole basis of the case actually trying to describe what a jaffa cake is but in plain english you're in sort of lay layman's terms what is a jaffa cake well it's a difficult difficult one to describe i'd probably describe it as but this is the herein lies the problem i'd probably describe it as a biscuity cake that's well like a biscuit but soft like a cake how would you describe them luke so i would say listeners so a jaffa cake they you'd find them probably in the biscuit area of the supermarket where you'd find your other biscuits like your classic digestive biscuits or chocolate digestive biscuits my personal favorite so you'd find them there and they come in a box and they're they're sort of round like you know typical english biscuit size i don't know how many centimeters in diameter that is but it doesn't matter really and and it's it's like it okay so it's it's a sort of a sponge the base the base of it is like sponge cake like sponge cake i'm not sure if it actually is sponge cake but it's like sponge cake and then on top of that there's a layer of like a sort of orangey sort of like marmalade stuff like an orange orange flavored fruit um jelly let's say and and then on the top of that is a layer of chocolate okay and it's when you bite into it it's quite soft it's chocolatey it's orangey you get a bit of sponginess you get the nice crunchy chocolate on the top and then at the the layer of orangey what did i say jelly in the in the middle they're absolutely delicious i could eat a whole box in one sitting without any without any trouble at all but so what's the problem then here what's why was why was this the subject of legal dispute so what happened so in 1973 there was this introduction of vat which is value-added tax for specific items so it's a kind of tax that companies can charge on their goods which then is passed generally passed on to the consumer and there's different rules that apply but basically if you have to charge v80 on your products then it's probably a bit of an administrative headache like you don't probably don't really want to be doing it anyway so the tax law basically said if you are a regular biscuit or if you are a cake or if you sell these things you don't need to pay any vat you don't need to charge any vat if however you are what we call a luxury biscuit which is a biscuit covered in chocolate then the standard rate of v80 applies which was 17.5 when this was introduced so here in lies the dilemma of is a jaffa cake a biscuit or a cake and the tax authorities they didn't charge any jaffa cakes were like free they didn't have to charge any vat from the introduction of it until 1991 and then suddenly the tax authorities in england turned around and were like hmm we're not sure about this we're missing a you know kind of think that they should be included as a luxury biscuit and so there was this court case where jaffa cakes were arguing that they were not a luxury biscuit they shouldn't be subject to this b.a.t tax they were indeed a cake and then the tax authority is going no way you're definitely a biscuit and like you said so the the arguments were basically like you raised some important arguments there luke the tax authorities argued that you know the jaffa cake you find in the biscuit section it's small like a biscuit it is what else we eat it like a snack okay like you said you could probably eat a box in one go you probably wouldn't eat a whole cake in one go although so we eat them we eat them in the same way that we eat biscuits we eat them in the same way that we eat biscuits so that was kind of the tax authority's argument they were like come on we want you to be subject to tax and the jaffa cakes were like no way we are soft like a cake the ingredients we use cake ingredients when we pour the ingredients into our mold it's like we pour it the ingredient mixture is like a cake mixture it's not like a dough like a hard pastry type ingredient like a like a like a biscuit or like a cookie they said that you know we're soft and spongy and apparently they like baked a gigantic jaffa cake to show to the court that you know if it was bigger it would definitely be a cake and basically that must have been that must have been a fantastic day in court it sounds like one of those really dramatic court cases where one day someone brings in a prop or an object into the courtroom and it's sort of like everyone's astonished and astounded and like look here is this cake this this is a full-sized jaffa cake and look it's definitely a cake isn't it and you know they all passed it round look and they're all eating it mmm certainly spongy hmm okay yeah i would have definitely if if i had ever become a solicitor or a barrister yes i would have loved to have been in on that case so anyway in the end the judge said what what do you think luke what do you think the final outcome was this is a really really it's a tough one i'm just thinking like so from the point of view of the tax authorities they're thinking well jaffa cakes they sell really well they're one of the country's top selling uh products if only we could get a little bit of that that cash for ourselves you know for the for the country's uh tax revenues so they're looking to get in on some of the jaffa cake action aren't they by imposing vat on it they could just not do anything but they've decided no i think that we can get some money here and jaffa cake understandably are thinking hands off it's called a jaffa cake for goodness sake it's obviously a cake we don't need to pay tax what did the judge decide i think after eating a number of jaffa cakes the judge probably what did the judge rule i think i know actually louise can i say you can say so isn't it this in the end the distinction between whether it was a cake or a biscuit whether it was a cake which wasn't subject to taxation or a a biscuit a luxury biscuit because it's got chocolate on top which would be subject to v80 this was decided by what happens when the cake or the biscuit kind of gets old so when you leave a biscuit on a plate without eating it or leave a cake on a plate plate without eating it for like three days and you come back to it what condition is it in because cakes and biscuits will do different things when they get old so a biscuit will go soft i don't if you've ever listened as you've ever had a cookie or a biscuit on the side you go away for the weekend you come back oh my biscuit and you pick it up and it sort of bends and breaks in your hand because it's gone all soft that's what biscuits do whereas cakes what happens to cakes they kind of go hard don't they so did they test a jaffa cake and and leave it for three days and and then come back to it and decide if it went soft or hard and on that basis decided whether it was a cake or a biscuit is that what happened i'm very impressed at your knowledge of this that's what happened and what's your what do you think happened with the so you know if you leave a jaffa cake do you think it's going to go hard like a cake or soft like a biscuit i'm trying to think you see because i've never left a jaffa cake in my life i've always eaten them within about a half an hour of opening the package yeah i see you you're out of control with the jaffa cakes totally biscuits and jaffa cakes they're just oh it's terrible i can't not eat them all so i think that a jaffa cake would go hard you are correct hey so basically that's what happened they decided that yeah it's a cake it's definitely a cake and they got you know they didn't have to be subject to the vat tax and why did i bother telling that story i told it because because this is exactly what lawyers do okay they they try to try to prevent these things from happening so of course if a biscuit had been defined in the tax law or a cake had been defined in the tax law or it had been perhaps more clearly written then maybe this particular dispute could have been avoided so the kind of making sure that you write and express yourself clearly and also of course present and speak in a in a clear way is crucial to a lawyer so yeah that's i think that was my point yes and it's also just a good story and it it kind of shows us that stories are absolutely vital for communicating things and teaching things and even something as potentially dry as as legal english and dry biscuits and cakes and stuff even something dry that you know boring like yeah law can be brought to life through stories and there are always stories to be found in legal english for example these cases of like a woman accidentally eating parts of a dead snail and and then a new law being created on the basis of it or the story of is a jaffa cake a cake or a biscuit actually um we didn't deal with the ruling that came out of the stevenson donahue case we didn't actually just decide what happened in the end i i'm looking at the wikipedia page for the case at this moment so maybe i can just read out read this out so the outline of the case as described on wikipedia is is that this case also known as the paisley snail or snail in the bottle case involves mrs may donahue drinking a bottle of ginger beer in a cafe in paisley renfrewshire in scotland unknown to her or anybody else a decomposed snail was in the bottle so nobody knew that the snail was in the bottle she fell ill she sued the ginger beer manufacturer mr stevenson so it was actually the the manufacturer not the cafe that was the other party the house of lords so this this case went quite high in terms of the you know the different courts that it can go to but the house of lords held held meaning they decided or said that the manufacturer owed a duty of care to mrs donohue which was breached because it was reasonably foreseeable that failure to ensure the product safety would lead to harm to consumers there was also a sufficiently proximate relationship between consumers and product manufacturers so i yeah so basically i think it was decided that the that letting a snail fall into the bottle and maybe i don't know why the transparency or opaqueness of the bottle was important i think that's i know why the opaqueness of the bottle the fact that you couldn't see through the glass of the bottle meant that the the cafe owner was not liable at all because the cafe owner had no idea and was not responsible for it because if if the bottle had been clear then maybe the cafe owner could reasonably have been expected to to see parts of a dead snail before serving it to a customer but he couldn't do that because of the opaqueness of the bottle so the cafe owner was was you know basically taken out of the matter and ultimately yes so the courts decided that the manufacturer of the ginger beer had a reasonable duty of care over its customers and failing to ensure that snails don't fall into the bottles failing to ensure that meant that they were liable and this just became a landmark case in tort law yeah which is super important because of course if you buy a product off amazon for example amazon you might have a contract between amazon but you haven't got a contract between the manufacturer of the product and so if you buy a product that i don't know you buy some headphones that then end up electrocuting yourself which i hope that doesn't happen you would be able to make a claim in talk with the with the manufacturer i mean probably these days they've got some kind of warranties or things like that that guarantee the there's also there's all kinds of extra laws that have come in place to kind of protect consumers which have developed but if there's none of that then you can claim and talk for this this uh idea that they've breached their their duty of care and some other point just to mention on the donna hughes stevenson case is that it originated in scotland so bearing in mind that scotland's a different jurisdiction to england and wales but because it was such an important case it went up it went right up to the house of lords which was now nowadays we have the supreme court of the united kingdom but at that time in the early 20th century it was the it was the most senior court in the united kingdom and it decided cases for all of the jurisdictions in the uk so that kind of like you said it set a precedent which then needed to be followed everywhere in in the united kingdom yes oh louise it's all very interesting i'm fascinated by this we could go on discussing these things for a lot longer but uh i think that there is a limit to how much um i know we can do this so let's see but if you know what if people want to hear more of this kind of conversation and this kind of teaching they can listen to your podcast so can you tell my listeners about your podcast and any other of any other services that you offer for those people who are interested sure sure so so i host a podcast called the study legal english podcast and you can find it if you go to studylegalenglish.com and as well if you you know any kind of application that you listen to your podcasts on just search for the study legal english podcast and yeah the aim of it is to talk about legal english to interview people who are from various backgrounds in the law and to help lawyers and law students around the world improve their legal english but also if you're kind of involved in business or you've got some kind of interest in the english legal system then you can check it out and so basically you know the podcast is is free obviously it's podcast and then i've got some membership features which are for people who would like to have access to extra resources and i've got a bonus code for you for you list if you're interested in trying it out then i've got a code which is luke law all one word and all uppercase which would get you 15 discount of my membership which is podcast pro and podcast lite the two memberships options where you get various extra things to the podcast so luke law all one word uppercase and you can get 15 discount and i also have a a free download of an introduction to legal english if you're interested in some of the stuff that we talked about today if you're maybe if you're a teacher and you're interested in teaching a bit of legal english or you're just curious to go back and hear some of those examples that we talked about today then i've got a download so if you go to studylegalenglish.com forward slash luke law you can have a you can find that that document to download so yeah i i recommend having a little peruse of legal english if it's interesting for you knowing a little bit about it you can you know impress your friends with a bit of legal english maybe as a party you can you can say i know the real meaning of party yeah you can you can entertain your friends by telling them the story of stevenson versus donahue or maybe ev any the next time you have a jaffa cake you can bore everyone around you by explaining in huge levels of detail the difference between a biscuit and a cake yeah exactly okay that's wonderful thanks louise so study legalenglish.com exactly yeah yeah okay luke law and listeners that's luke spelled l-u-k-e not l-u-c-k not l-o-o-k okay l-u-k-e please luke law you get 15 off that's not bad nice one well louise it's been it's been really interesting talking to you it's been great to actually revisit a lot of the legal english that i used to teach much more regularly than i do now and yeah good luck over there in oman with your punishing teaching schedule nice nice one thank you thank you luke it's been very nice to chat to you and yeah thank you very much thanks again to louise don't forget to check out her podcast if you want to hear more the study legal english podcast with louise kilbicki also head over to louise's website that's studylegalenglish.com for all the info that you need and if you want fifteen percent off louise's paid content you can use the offer code luke law at checkout l-u-k-e-l-a-w that's luke law l-u-k-e-l-a-w for a 15 discount from the podcast pro and podcast lite packages available on studylegalenglish.com okay well that was a big punch of legal english right into your face wasn't it just a recap we talked about barristers and solicitors we talked about differences between general english and legal english and words that mean different things across those two types of english we talked about jurisdictions and differences in language specifically between england and the united states for the most part we talked about learning legal concepts as you learn the language which hopefully is something that you've done in this episode too elements to a contract to make it valid including the idea of consideration we talked about how law is made civil law systems versus common law systems and then some of those entertaining old cases like donohue versus stevenson the snail the the case of the jaffa cakes taught law negligence the duty of care a bit of a history lesson and those pairs of words that basically mean the same thing some weird things about legal english okay so i hope you found that useful as ever i welcome you to leave your comments on the website teacherloop.co.uk find the page for this episode and leave your comment there that's the best place to do it also download my app the looks english podcast app to get the entire episode archive on your phone with loads of bonus content too including various full-length episodes that you may have never heard before and also other things like over a hundred mini phrasal verb episodes and more that's the luke's english podcast app on your phone it's completely free why don't you go and get it right now um also subscribe to luke's english podcast premium to gain access to all of those episodes all of those premium episodes that you know you you probably haven't ever heard there's over 100 of them and pdfs and stuff too specifically designed to help you broaden your vocabulary and grammar and improve your pronunciation teacherluke dot co dot uk premium info that's it for this episode though you can expect more free and premium content to arrive over the next few weeks including those subtitle or text videos that will be appearing on my youtube channel i have plenty of ideas and i'm looking forward to another year of luke's english podcast and i sincerely hope you join me for the english and also for the enjoyment speak to you again next time but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye [Music] thanks for listening to luke's english podcast for more information visit teacherluke.com you

Channel: Luke's English Podcast

Views: 18,098

Rating: 4.9702444 out of 5

Keywords: learn, learning, english, lesson, lessons, luke, podcast, luke's, vocabulary, native, speaker, interviews, listening, pronunciation, british, accent, london

Id: oUMR8_8OUb0

Length: 78min 56sec (4736 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021