Dr Matthew Williams, Tutor in Politics and Access Fellow at Jesus College, has published a new book which explores the changing language of legislation over the past century, looking at how and why the judiciary has become more involved in disputes around public policy and litigation.

In Judges and the Language of Law – Why Governments Across the World Have Increasingly Lost in Court (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Matthew analyses the evolution of the language of politics across the 20^th and early 21^st centuries, and the effects of that evolution on litigation strategies and public administration.  By focussing on power across seven decades, and on five jurisdictions in particular – Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US – his research finds that judges behaved with political consequence not necessarily when they wanted to, but when they had the means, opportunity, and institutional incentives to.

As Petra Schleiter, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford, says in her review of the book, “This elegantly written monograph argues persuasively that a central cause for the decades-long expansion of judicial power lies not so much in the ambition of judges as in changes of the law itself: As the specificity of laws has declined, so the power of the courts has expanded.”

Matthew says, “I’ve been interested in the power of judges for some time now. It struck me that politicians the world over were increasingly whingeing about losing court battles, and I wanted to understand if that was true, and if so why it was happening. The more I looked into it, the more it became clear that it is not that judges are snatching power for themselves, but they are having power thrust into their hands.”

 

“Put plainly, the language of legislation has changed. Laws have been, to an increasing extent, linguistically underdetermined. This indeterminate language of law represents the social ambivalence and loose policy bargains that preceded it. And, in turn, the indeterminacy of language enables post-promulgation discretion for policy implementation. This is a meso-level theory, where language connects macro-level social changes to individual court rulings at a micro-level. It is not simply that governments increasingly break laws, it is that the precise substance and correct procedural implementation of laws is less easily identifiable.” 

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS, FREng, Principal of Jesus College, says “We live in an age of data and data analytics. Analysing huge swathes of legislative text across time and jurisdictions, Matthew Williams has revealed a series of fascinating changes in language use.  He clearly demonstrates that indeterminacy in the language of legislation affords considerable scope for judges and those exercising judicial determinations to exercise wide powers of interpretation. This clearly written book with its compelling narrative is an important contribution to our understanding of law and policy in the 21st century.”