Efficient language hypothesis

The JC’s guide to writing nice.™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Plain English Drafting Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

A bedfellow to the more famous efficient market hypothesis, the JC’s efficient language hypothesis states that the universally acknowledged advantages in efficiency, clarity, brevity and productivity offered by simple, clear and plain legal drafting are so compelling that sustained prolixity is impossible in commercial contracts, and all bilateral accords will eventually resolve themselves to, at most, terse bullet points rendered on a cocktail napkin, and ideally some kind of mark-up language or machine code. This, the JC goes on to conclude, must mean that the commercial world we appear to live in is just a bad dream..

See also

• Semantic code project
• Efficient market hypothesis
• A Manual of Style For the Drafting of Contracts — a masterwork dedicated to the fastidious, clear, simple, plain, brisk and concise drafting and subsequent (or precedent) negotiation and/or preparation thereof of contractual and quasi-contractual obligations in written (including for the avoidance of doubt electronic) form howsoever and wheresoever described, as amended from time to time, for the time being, which time shall for the avoidance of doubt and without limitation be and be deemed to be, of the essence.