Template:Legal drafting capsule

Remember the starting assumption of all legal drafting: there is no frippery. Legal language is utilitarian. Spartan. Terse. It does not engage with trifles. What need not be said is not said. There are no incidentals, no figures — no metaphors in a legal tract. One leaves no scope for misinterpretation. Thus, every legal eagle addresses legal language presented to her the same way. If it is there, it must mean something. It must need to be said. What am I missing? This is the fear. She guards against this fear by deploying defensive language in return. The irony of this devotional commitment to abstemious precision is that when two or more practitioners are pitted against one another in its service, it leads so inexorably to such flabby, redundant, baroquity.