This is my language, and yet it is not. Towards a clear and consistent use of terminology in the legal language in social law.

For the longest time, the language used in legal texts has been subject to severe criticism: legal texts are written in a difficult, archaic language, and their structure is near to inaccessible.  However, this ascertainment has never lead to anything more than just that: there is hardly any concrete advice to make changes, and hardly any systematic research into this problem has been done.

The aim of this research is to make a first step towards creating a consistent and clear legal language for social law: a legal language which is effective for the different users of social law (legal practitioners, civilians, social partners, the government…) and that can be used uniformly in different sources of social law.

Social law is traditionally a field aiming for social justice and the protection of the (economically) weaker person in society.  It covers various aspects in the daily life of every person, form birth until the grave.  This makes that in this field of law a clear and consistent legal language is even more important than in other fields.

To attain this goal, the use of 15-20 specific legal terms from social law will compared throughout the different sources of social law (law texts, case law, collective labour agreements…) to be able to determine the clarity, and the internal and external consistency in the usage.