An investigation into formal and functional characteristics of qualifications in legislative writing and its application to English for academic legal purposes.

The present investigation is based on a linguistic analysis of the 'Housing Act 1980' and attempts to examine the role of qualifications in the structuring of the legislative statement. The introductory chapter isolates legislative writing as a "sub-variety “of legal language and provides an overview of the controversies surrounding the way it is written and the problems it poses to its readers. Chapter two emphasizes the limitations of the available work on the description of language-varieties for the analysis of legislative writing and outlines the approach adopted for the present analysis. This chapter also gives some idea of the information-structuring of legislative provisions and establishes qualification as a key element in their textualisation. The next three chapters offer a detailed account of the ten major qualification-types identified in the corpus, concentrating on the surface form they take, the features of legislative statements they textualize and the syntactic positions to which they are generally assigned in the statement of legislative provisions. The emerging hypotheses in these chapters have often been verified through a specialist reaction from a Parliamentary Counsel, largely responsible for the writing of the ‘Housing Act 1980’• The findings suggest useful correlations between a number of qualificational initiators and the various aspects of the legislative statement. They also reveal that many of these qualifications typically occur in those clause-medial syntactic positions which are sparingly used in other specialist discourse, thus creating syntactic discontinuity in the legislative sentence. Such syntactic discontinuities, on the evidence from psycholinguistic experiments reported in chapter six, create special problems in the processing and comprehension of legislative statements. The final chapter converts the main linguistic findings into a series of pedagogical generalizations, offers indications of how this may be applied in EALP situations and concludes with other considerations of possible applications.

A comparative evaluation of the legislative controls on unfair terms and exemption clauses in consumer and business contracts in England and Brazil

The purpose of the present study is to make a comparative evaluation of the legislative controls on unfairness in the context of B2B, B2C and small businesses contracts in England and Brazil. This work will focus on the examination of statutes and relevant case law which regulate exemption clauses and terms on the basis of their ‘unfairness’. The approach adopted by legislation and courts towards the above controls may vary according to the type of contract. Business contracts are more in line with the classical model of contract law according to which parties are presumably equals and able to negotiate terms. As a consequence interventions should be avoided for the sake of freedom of contract even if harmful terms were included. Such assumption of equality however is not applicable to small businesses contracts because SMEs are often in a disadvantageous position in relation to their larger counterparties. Consumer contracts in their turn are more closely regulated by the English and Brazilian legal systems which recognised that vulnerable parties are more exposed to unfair terms imposed by the stronger party as a result of the inequality of bargaining power. For this reason those jurisdictions adopted a more interventionist approach to provide special protection to consumers which is in line with the modern law of contract. The contribution of this work therefore consists of comparing how the law of England and Brazil tackles the problem of ‘unfairness’ in the above types of contracts. This study will examine the differences and similarities between rules and concepts of both jurisdictions with references to the law of their respective regional trade agreements (EU and the Mercosul). Moreover it will identify existing issues in the English and Brazilian legislation and recommend lessons that one system can learn from the other.