In the United States of America, the issue of the comprehensibility of legislation and individual decisions has been in the field of decision-making since the 1990s. It was realized that the lack of comprehensibility could cause a serious democracy deficit. The goal of the Plain Language Movement from the beginning is that creator of legal texts shall take into account the addressees' abilities and the easier comprehensibility of legal texts by non-specialists. The study seeks an answer to the question of whether today's Hungarian legislation, governmental law-making, as well as the court, prosecutor's office, official and other law enforcement could use the requirement system of a commonly understandable legal language.
Keywords: law and language, plain language, comprehensibility, legal certainty
Balázs Szabolcs Gerencsér, associate professor, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, gerencser.balazs@jak.ppke.hu.
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A defining prerequisite of legal certainty includes the clarity and unambiguity of legislation - the principle of the clarity of norms. Due to its importance, this principle appeared in the early decisions of the Constitutional Court of Hungary, and over the past 30 years a consistent constitutional case law has crystallized around it. This paper examines the clarity of norms through decisions of the Constitutional Court of Hungary concerning pieces of legislation, which were among the first to explain the subject and can be interpreted simply. First, we unravel the constitutional requirements arising from the clarity of norms and its components: the importance of the norm addressees, furthermore, how the constitutional standard can differ according to groups of addressees, and the legal interpretation as general remediation of violations of the clarity of norms. The paper then focuses on the question of the usage of legal terms and evaluates the constitutionality various legislative drafting techniques, such as the use of exemplificative definition, general terms, and terms across the legal system. Next, we review how regulations can violate the clarity of norms, how this can be remedied by legal interpretation, and also the cases where this method was not efficient, leading to the ruling of the unconstitutionality of the given act or legal provision. By doing so, we also look at some critical aspects of these reasonings. This paper finds that, although the Constitutional Court of Hungary only establishes the violation of the principle of the clarity of norms in exceptional cases, the emerged case law provides a valuable guideline for legislation in order to enforce the clarity of norms more consistently and effectively.
Keywords: Clarity of norms, Legal certainty, Constitutional Court of Hungary, Case law, Legislative drafting
Zsolt Vladár, Senior legislative drafting advisor, The Office of the National Assembly, vladar.zsolt@parlament.hu.
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