2 A clash of disciplinary styles

Style seems to be everywhere today in ordinary life, ‘absolute reference, ultimate value’ (Bordas, Reference Bordas2008, p. 15),Footnote ² in art history as in fashion, in music as in politics. Style comes into play not only in literary texts, but also in scientific texts. In fact, ‘every practice … involves a style’ (Granger, Reference Granger1968/1988, p. 11). Moreover, the concept has become an object of study for several disciplines, namely stylistics, linguistics, philosophy, logic and, more recently, artificial intelligence (Molino, Reference Molino, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 257). In all of these academic discourses, the dominant paradigm commands a view of style that builds on a ‘presumption of invariance’ according to which ‘stylistic variation leaves untouched the truth values’ of the message being conveyed (Martin, Reference Martin, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 11). Pursuant to this vision, there would be, on the one hand, the content, fixed, invariant, and, on the other hand, the form, flexible, versatile. ‘The axiom of style is therefore this: there are several ways to express the same thing’ (Bordas, Reference Bordas2008, p. 58, emphasis in original). This ‘thing’ would be something from the real world that the mind is able to grasp intellectually, neutrally, cognitively and to which the artist, the writer, the individual gives shape through language, stylistically, emphatically, ornamentally. Under this optic, style is never more than an ancillary element, some ‘clothing, mask or make-up’ (Compagnon, Reference Compagnon1997, p. 9) behind which lies pure meaning. As such, it is literally meaningless, since, though words remain indispensable for the articulation of ideas, the variation brought about by changes in style would not in itself impact on meaning. This conception of style is tributary to a principle of dualism separating thinking (the signified) from language (the signifier) that harks back to Aristotle (Combe, Reference Combe, Molinié and Cahné1994; Bordas, Reference Bordas2008). With this binary vision, we inscribe ourselves in a ‘spatialized imaginary’ (Combe, Reference Combe, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 73) at the core of which we find meta-physical dichotomies such as internal/external or outside/inside. Thought would dwell inside one's being and would remain anterior to language, which would only come to make the former available to us, by verbally positing it in the world.

Alongside the idea of a separation between form and content and in close connection with it, the classical ages entertained a normative conceptualisation of style. If one can freely choose among several stylistic possibilities in order to render the exact same information, one had better choose either the form that suits the best the purpose of the message or that otherwise would register some sort of aesthetic superiority. Style appears thus as a synonym for eloquence or elegance. It is perceived as ‘a formal decoration …, a distancing from the normal or neutral way of talking’ (Molino, Reference Molino, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 231).

Before the sixteenth century, style used to be conceived from an objective standpoint, as a skill ‘out there’ that an author could and had to learn by imitation (Molino, Reference Molino, Molinié and Cahné1994): style as a code; style as good manners. In this sense, the notion denotes correction justly recalling us the collective dimension of any individual becoming: ‘with the mention of the word style … the child makes his or her own a particularly efficient social code’ (Bordas, Reference Bordas2008, p. 51). Let us remember that, in art history, ‘school’ stands as an equivalent for style, expressing a compulsory reference to authority and norms.

Later on, under the influence of the Renaissance and humanist values, authors began to turn their back to this objectifying conception and embrace a subjective view of style, which came to be seen, especially in art history and literary critique, as singular creativity characterising one particular author. Thus, a shift in meaning occurred from correction to distinction and, as such, from a collective to an individual understanding of style.

However, no matter how much we tend today to continue emphasising the individual facet of the concept in order to celebrate free will and the refusal of conventions, the fact remains that most branding in terms of style involves a generalisation (Vouilloux, Reference Vouilloux2008, p. 205). Academic discourses illustrate very well this duality of style, namely that of carrying at once the connotation of taxonomy and individuality, of repetition and singularity. Indeed, within any given discipline, the writings of the different authors resemble stylistically but the very same writings also differ from the writings of academics belonging to other fields of study. It is then precisely this cross-disciplinary variation in conjunction with an intra-disciplinary repetition that allows us to talk about disciplinary styles.

Therefore, the interdisciplinary researcher finds himself or herself in a difficult position for he or she is bound, before anything else, to deal with the various particularities of the styles that characterise the disciplines in which he or she takes interest. His or her task will be in fact all the more demanding since, as I will try to show, style is never simply only style; that is a question of mere dressing. Disciplines, which are ideologically and discursively situated, inquire into different objects of study or into the same objects of study but under different angles. In doing so, they employ specific vocabularies (jargons) but also peculiar styles of expression visible in academics’ speeches, be they written or oral. If natural languages comprise a multitude of linguistic registers, of which the academic register is just one, the latter ‘is not the uniformly faceless prose it is thought to be but displays considerable differences between disciplines’ (Hyland, Reference Hyland2002, p. 351). Academic English, for instance, is not one (Hyland and Bondi, Reference Hyland and Bondi2006). Thus, given their socialisation in a specific writing that is reproducing itself from one generation to the next and that remains indispensable if scholars are to obtain their certificate of disciplinary competence, it comes as no surprise that the ‘prose’ of philosophers differs from the one of historians and that the ‘prose’ of historians, in its turn, differs from the one of linguists, etc. As Ken Hyland (Reference Hyland2004), an author who has extensively investigated the topic of disciplinary identities, points out, academics ‘seek to embed their writing in a particular social world’ (p. 1).

Moreover, in addition to the variations of rhetoric across disciplines, one is faced with different styles of expression even within the same discipline as one travels from a national context to another. By changing the language of research, we are entering a different cognitive universe, if only because this move will most likely compel us to restructure our work so as to include different bibliographical resources. Indeed, there is more than a chance that a sociologist's study in Spanish that draws on Spanish, Portuguese and French texts will differ from the English contribution of a sociologist who referred to English, American and Australian sources. One author explains that

For instance, one such comparative piece of research refers to the difference between English and oriental languages in the ‘rhetorical structuring of an argumentative paper’ (Gotti, Reference Gotti and Gotti2012, p. 33; Kaplan, Reference Kaplan1966), while another study highlights the fact that, under certain circumstances, language and not disciplinary culture might be the more important variable governing the pattern of meta-text in academic discourse (Dahl, Reference Dahl2004, p. 1808).

In brief, researchers act in a context that is cultural threefold – because it is nationally, linguistically and disciplinary coloured – and ‘where [therefore] what counts as convincing argument and appropriate tone is carefully managed for a particular audience’ (Hyland, Reference Hyland2004, p. 3). It is enough to think about all the possible combinations between these three elements – nationality, language, disciplinary training – to which we could add the fact that authors always retain a personal touch, since no two individuals ever ‘receive’ the one culture, language or discipline in the exact same manner, to end up with a picture very much contradicting the classical view according to which ‘scientific practice seems … to set aside the individual, and consequently to turn away from style’ (Granger, Reference Granger1968/1988, p. 13).

While ‘a panoptic overview of signature writing styles across disciplines would be an impossible task’ (Sword, Reference Sword2011, p. 15), let us simply keep in mind for the time being that there is significant linguistic variation across disciplines.

Philosopher of science, Ludwik Fleck (Reference Fleck and Jas1935/2008), had already argued in 1935 that disciplinary communities exhibit different thought styles that make some statements, within a given discipline, possible and render others simply inconceivable. More recent authors, such as Michèle Lamont for instance, identify in the social sciences and the humanities four such ‘epistemological styles’, namely the comprehensive, the constructivist, the positivist and the utilitarian, and attribute, based on empirical research, to various disciplines different scales of inclination for a particular style (Lamont, Reference Lamont2009, p. 56). Moreover, contrary to the general perception regarding the so-called hard sciences, it is worth noting that scientists also advocate for the recognition of epistemological pluralism:

Now, the above-mentioned variation in disciplinary languages and discursive styles has its roots in the obvious fact that researchers across the knowledge spectrum write about very different subjects, from plant-based digital data storage to the dangers of illiberalism. But does this diversity of linguistic styles also reflect the above-mentioned variety of epistemological styles underlying these very different topics?

In providing an answer, I want to first emphasise that epistemology (the style of reasoning or how we reason) and the reasoned content (the reasoning itself or what we reason) cannot be usefully separated from each other (they can, of course, be delineated linguistically speaking, as the first part of this very sentence illustrates). And this conceptual impossibility seems to me to always be the case, not only in respect of those disciplines that more visibly deal with constructed realities, but in the sciences as well. Drawing on the idea of ‘styles of scientific thinking’ advanced by the historian of science, A.C. Crombie, Ian Hacking (Reference Hacking1992) argues that epistemology partakes in the creation of novel objects of study: ‘styles … open up new territory as they go’ (p. 8). Or, to put it differently, ‘it is not so much the object that determines the style or method of inquiry as the style that contributes to construct the object qua scientific object’ (Ruphy, Reference Ruphy2011, p. 1220). For example, it is statistics that introduced the object of a population characterised by a mean and a standard deviation (Hacking, Reference Hacking1992, p. 15). Thus, ‘to be is to be the object of a reasoning process constitutive of a style of scientific reasoning’ (Ruphy, Reference Ruphy2011, p. 1219). While Hacking's thesis unveils the factitiousness of even those sciences that are generally reputed as only mirroring reality, it should not be taken to mean that epistemological styles precede content: ‘We should not have the picture of a style and then the novelties …. We did not first have fauvism, and then Matisse and Derain painting fauve pictures in 1905’ (Hacking, Reference Hacking1992, p. 11).

Second, language (the style of speaking or writing) and message (what is being spoken or written, and we have previously seen that what is being spoken or written is always ‘content’ together with ‘its’ epistemology) cannot be insulated from each other either. Thus, we should acknowledge that ‘there is no innocent variation [;]… [a]ny variation is at the same time a semantic variation, and, therefore, finally … everything is meaning’ (Valentin, Reference Valentin, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 333). When we proofread our texts and operate changes, even minor ones such as the insertion or the suppression of a comma or a word, are we not, in fact, reflecting on the very message that we want to convey or the criteria of knowledge validity that we let ourselves be guided by?

The French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Reference Merleau-Ponty1969/1992; Reference Merleau-Ponty1960/2001), challenged the dialectical (thought and language, thought against language, thought or language) and the temporalised perspective (thought before language or language after thought) ensuing from a dualist vision of language. He insisted that the two must be considered in their inextricable entanglement and therefore suggested to rather talk about ‘thinking language’ (‘parole pensante’) and ‘speaking thought’ (‘pensée parlante’):

This unitary conception does not in any case entail a relation of equivalence or organic suture between word and world. Indeed, words do not unproblematically translate the world (Legrand, Reference Legrand and Petersen2008). Instead, a non-binary vision allows us to see that each entity of the conventional dichotomy builds upon the other. As such, style inescapably ‘embodies an epistemology’ (Sontag, Reference Sontag1966, p. 35) – an idea that echoes Marcel Proust's (1927/Reference Proust1989, p. 474) statement according to which style is ‘a matter of vision’.

From the negation of the classical separation thesis that assigns to style an accessory role and transforms it into a purely formal element devoid of any signification, it also follows that style is not a matter of absolute free choice and unfettered originality, since the couple ‘content–epistemology’ forces upon the researcher specific rhetorical patterns and strategic textual markers (and vice versa). This does not mean, however, that we can no longer talk about style: ‘the manifestation of a structuration process does not exclude a stylistic dimension’ (Legrand, Reference Legrand and Kasirer2003, p. 158). Indeed, a given expression can be singular without being subjective (Laurent, Reference Laurent2000, p. 100), as discursive practices in the realm of academic disciplines prove only too well. Dominique Combe (Reference Combe1991), for instance, evokes ‘style’ in terms of an ‘impetus’ (p. 116) – a notion that I believe adequately accounts for how researchers approach writing in academic literature. More often than not, writers attach themselves unreflectively, and very emotionally, to a tradition that limits, in a symbolically coercive way, the number of expressive possibilities available. It is not an exaggeration to say that disciplinary styles entail a form of violence, to which, incidentally, the French word ‘stylet’ – meaning a very sharp weapon that can cause small wounds (Trésor de la langue française) – alludes.

To summarise, what is apparent to me at this stage is that an interdisciplinary researcher has to make do with a panoply of disciplinary styles that, far from being only variations of words, syntax and other textual elements, represent world visions, entire sets of beliefs about what it takes to advance meaningful knowledge. It is not astonishing then that the moment scholars from any discipline step outside their own field of study, the feeling they experience in their initially tentative path towards interdisciplinarity amounts to nothing short of an intellectual vertigo.

3 Law's ‘readerly’ style

Are legal scholars from the continental tradition sufficiently well equipped for exploring law outside law and thus undergoing a destabilising epistemic process? In order to be able to offer a response, I will introduce here a distinction put forth by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes, between ‘readerly’ (‘lisibles’) and ‘writerly’ (‘scriptibles’) texts.

In his analysis of Honoré de Balzac's novel, Sarrasine, Barthes (Reference Barthes1970) distinguishes between ‘readerly’ texts that conduct the reader towards a single meaning, suggesting that this would be the product of a single voice – that of the author constraining the reader to passively receive the meaning – and ‘writerly’ texts, which do not seek to stabilise for good a message through a language, but invite the reader to actively contribute to the construction of the meaning (p. 27). Barthes wants the reader to understand that there is a certain play of the text – the text itself is moving and, at the same time, the reader can make the text move in order to innovate it, to take it far from the (interpretive) beaten tracks (Barthes, Reference Barthes1970, p. 23). Thus, the writerly text, by denouncing the illusion of a progressive narrative that would transport the meaning intact from the author to the reader, allows the latter to do more than just read the text – that is, more than mechanically repeat the words of the author. By contrast, at the risk of a certain degree of incomprehensibility (ilisibilité), the writerly text encourages the reader to build in the writing of the author, thus helping reveal its intertextuality (the plurality of the readerly, though not inexistent, is much more limited). The border between writing and reading is thus bound to become blurred. When faced with a writerly text, the interpreter is called upon to reflect on other possible, enriching meanings that would enable him or her to relocate the text beyond what has already been said. Whereas the readerly text is a writing that comforts the reader, the writerly text confronts the reader, by calling into question his or her historical, cultural and psychological codes (Barthes, Reference Barthes1970, p. 31). As such, a readerly text conceals from its reader the latter's interpretive power and, therefore, its structuring mechanisms hamper the possibility of a radical, subversive reading. Indeed, as one author interpreting Barthes suggests, a readerly text obeys a ‘principle of solidarity’ according to which the reader is presented with a coherent totality that holds up by itself and must not be infringed on the occasion of the reading and a ‘principle of causality’ by virtue of which a text's narrative revolves around a chain of pseudo-logical determinations that go from cause to effect (Del Lungo, Reference Del Lungo2016, p. 3).

I should add that the dichotomy ‘readerly/writerly’ that Barthes advances does not refer to a historical, descriptive discourse.Footnote ³ Thus, there are no classical texts that would only be readerly, on the one hand, and modern texts that would only be writerly, on the other (Barthes, Reference Barthes1973, p. 32). Rather, this classification should be perceived as articulating a normative discourse about emancipation as a positive value (on the side of the writerly text) to be contrasted with conformism (on the side of the readerly texts). Thinkers of Luhmannian allegiance would, in fact, ascribe modernity to ‘the readerly’, perceived as reflecting a functionally differentiated discourse that manages to reduce complexity. ‘The writerly’, by contrast, with its ‘many-voicedness’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 27), seen as incapable of untangling the many faces of reality for the purpose of efficiency, would stand for backwardness. In reply, I would argue that, as academics, we certainly live in a ‘system’ with a logic of its own, where we do not mainly act as politicians or investors or artists. But, once ‘inside’ that world, whose internal logic lies essentially in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, systems theory shall no longer apply (other than for strictly organisational reasons). In other words, if there is indeed a danger in bringing politics or economics to academia, what would be the danger in bringing ethics to physics or law to technology? Would not the peril reside, in fact, in keeping disciplines out of each other's reach, in making them ‘prisons of understanding’ (Cotterrell, Reference Cotterrell1998, p. 171)?

This being said, the majority of legal texts (the official, legal materials, as well as the productions of scholars) are, in my view, in the civil-law tradition at least, readerly texts in the sense in which their language compels the reader to extract the only purportedly true meaning of the text, which is moreover presumed to encapsulate ‘one single reality’ (Bercea, Reference Bercea2014, p. 279). Pierre Legrand (Reference Legrand and Kasirer2003) has described French ‘civilisme’ in terms of an apodictic style that presupposes a ‘sustained affirmation of values such as clarity, fixity, stability, constancy and, correlatively, the refusal of indeterminacy or ambiguity’ (p. 178). By translating ordinary life into categories of legal thinking that they often envisage as fixed, stable and complete, lawyers ‘ordain the closure of texts’ (Barthes, Reference Barthes1973, p. 22). ‘The act of naming a thing from the point of view of the law makes it enter the world of “legal things”’ (Grzegorczyk, Reference Grzegorczyk and Amselek1986, p. 189). As a consequence, in a lawyer's text, ideally, one should only come across legal objects and engage with them in the pure manner a positivist thinker like Hans Kelsen dreamt of. Indeed, legal positivism tries to stop the play and the plural of the text by suppressing all the latent aspects that might be relevant from a socio-legal point of view but that legal doctrine qualifies as irritants tainting the supposedly neutral approach to law. This epistemology of exclusion gives birth to linguistic practices that produce readerly texts and vice versa.

At once concrete and abstract, simple and complex, legal language, in particular that of the legislator or the judge, aims at cultivating precision (Mattila, Reference Mattila and Goddard2013, p. 102). Thus, it often displays a categorical tone. In order to rest assured that the goal of semantic exactitude – linked to such crucial notions as security or liberty – is achieved, lawyers prefer to resort to what in ordinary language one would consider a linguistic mistake (like tautology or pleonasm) (Mattila, Reference Mattila and Goddard2013, p. 113). Moreover, because law is considered to be a language of reason, metaphors or other means of expressivity are usually not included in practitioners’ discourses (Cornu, Reference Cornu2005, p. 313). It is worth mentioning here the instructions given by the Belgian State Council (Conseil d’État de la Belgique, 2008) in a document regarding the drafting of legislation:

Moreover, it is recommended to use ‘precise words that reflect the exact intention to be conveyed’, ‘simple’, ‘ordinary and concrete’, ‘short’ words, ‘words deprived of ambiguity, that is words that do not risk to be understood in different senses’ (p. 7). Thus, in law, perhaps more than in other disciplines,

Of course, the above-mentioned recommendations do not constitute a manual of style that would be compulsory for the legal scholar as well, but they highlight that positive law, the main and sometimes the only bibliography of the legal scholar doing research in the form of legal doctrine, inevitably confronts him or her with readerly texts. Several authors researching in the field of genre analysis suggest that ‘law relies on extreme conservatism in the way it constructs its discourses’ and that ‘textbook writing [in law] is no exception in this respect’ (Bhatia, Reference Bhatia2004, p. 39; Candlin et al., Reference Candlin, Bhatia, Christian, Cortese and Riley2002). Indeed, according to orthodox legal thinking, if the jurist is to be a good jurist, he or she has to withstand the desire of embracing a personal style, since having a style means making one's voice heard; it amounts to putting a signature on one's writing; it represents, at the end of the day, an infringement on the sanctity of law and legal authorities: ‘to think formally, to think neutrally, to think impersonally depends on an ideal of self-effacement, an emptying of the subject, a suppression of imagination’ (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich2000, p. 1120). Let us recall that Emperor Justinian forbade any commentary on the Digest (Pringsheim, 1950/Reference Pringsheim1961) while Napoleon, at the thought of judges freely interpreting the law, would have exclaimed ‘my code is lost’. Thus, history tells us that legal language has been conventionally (and paradoxically) conceptualised as epitomising a neutral styleFootnote ⁴: legal style as anti-style.

At this point, I wish to bring in a brief discussion about style in the common-law tradition. To begin with, the formal, categorical and distant style that makes for readerly legal texts in the civil-law world is less common in common-law countries where the language of numerous court decisions, especially those whose social stakes are particularly high, comes close to the aesthetics of literary works, due to, among other factors, the linguistic games intertwining analogies and distinctions that are typical of this legal tradition. Empirical studies focusing on the language of judicial opinions have underlined the dialogical character of the common law, which had already been philosophically engaged in other studies (Legrand and Samuel, Reference Legrand and Samuel2005). Indeed, a typical common-law judge will

This relational, differential and not referential mentality might explain, at least in part, the relative easiness with which many north-American and other common-law jurists draw on other disciplinary discourses, not only in research, but also in case-law. It is interesting to mention here another empirical study that has identified the number of extra-legal references made by the Supreme Court of the United States and other American courts between 1950 and 1990 (Schauer and Wise, Reference Schauer and Wise2000, p. 495). The authors show an increasing tendency in judges’ decisions to include supporting references that depart from the typical legal authorities. Thus, from 1950 to 1990, there has been a fourfold increase in the number of non-legal citations in absolute numbers in the US Supreme Court's case-law while the number of citations per page has remained constant (Schauer and Wise, Reference Schauer and Wise2000, p. 503).

Further empirical studies explicitly comparing the styles of civil-law and common-law research papers written in English suggest that common-law scholarship is more ‘writerly’ in spirit than civil-law scholarship (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012).Footnote ⁵ The interpretation of data points out the fact that ‘CoL [common-law] experts are keener to handle … “polemically comparative” strategies, using alternative viewpoints to support a claim’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012, p. 136) that ‘CoL writers tend to exploit interaction and personalization, and use a tentative mode of argumentation, while CiL [civil-law] experts generally resort to a more detached style, and to a more assertive and confident tone’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012, p. 137), that ‘the discourse of civil law experts [is intended to] be perceived as authoritative [and] [in order] [t]o attain this, CiL lawyers … limit or avoid relating the propositional content of a claim to their personal and subjective opinion, since this would undermine its value as carrier of objective truth’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012, p. 140) and, finally, that ‘CiL experts tend to textualize statements in a positive and confident fashion, representing the propositional content with little co-textual critical framing’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012, p. 140). While common-law thinkers seem to embrace a ‘polyphonic rhetoric’, which ‘demonstrates sensitivity to the view of readers and … seeks to involve them in a dialogue’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012, p. 139), civil-law scholars adhere to the ‘principle of non-negotiable truth’ (Sala, Reference Sala and Gotti2012) and exclude readers, themselves and any disciplinary others from the text, so that the appearance of law's centrality and its peremptory character can be preserved. To take just one example from this study, the use of mitigating resources, that is textual elements meant to relativise the argument, were remarkably (three to ten times) more common in the CoL sub-corpus.

I replicated Sala's empirical study on a sample of 430,000 words corresponding to thirty-two law papers published in 2016 in Revista Română de Drept Privat [Romanian Journal of Private Law], the leading private law journal in Romania. Results are not at all surprising and point to the ‘hyper-positivism’ of Romanian legal scholarship. Personal pronouns (first- and second-person) are almost non-existent, as are other textual markers that would indicate willingness from the part of the author to engage with his or her readers or otherwise admit his or her intervention in the handling of legal materials. By way of a comparative illustration, hedges such as the verb ‘suggest’ appear 0.20 times per 10,000 words in Romanian law papers, 1.2 times in papers from other civil-law countries written in English and 5.3 times in common-law papers written in English.Footnote ⁶

In this section, I portrayed the civil lawyer's writing style as readerly, in practice as in research. By contrast, I argued that the common law is, on the whole, more writerly. The scholarship produced in the common-law world also happens to be more interdisciplinary. This can be explained by reference to various historical reasons, which are, in fact, not necessarily the same from one legal system to another. Thus, in the UK, it is essentially the fact that, for a long time, the training of lawyers lied with the professions and not the university, which allowed scholars to produce a type of research unconnected to the pragmatic purposes of the legal practice. As for US common law, it certainly matters that, before becoming a lawyer, one will have been formally trained in philosophy, economics, literature, history, anthropology, etc. Therefore, it would be a mistake to claim that common law's openness towards other disciplinary discourses directly follows from its writerly spirit. But it is, I think, hardly exaggerated to say that language must have played its part.

Interdisciplinarity qua intellectual endeavour solicits as a prerequisite an emotional determination to recognise the other's existence, which, discourse analyses tell us, seems, in general, to be lacking in civil-law lawyers. As I argued before, style and epistemology act inseparably. In other words, the epistemic content, ‘the how’ of the thinking, lies in the form, in the ‘how’ of the writing. In law, a discipline that, unlike anthropology for instance, has little self-reflective inclination, it is, I would suggest, the style of writing more than explicit theories that, first and foremost, speaks to questions of epistemology. By reading the imperturbable, too readily readerly legal texts and by learning to write in imitation of the prevalent manners, the student becomes imbued with a legal cosmogony whose tenets will prove unshakable for as long as he or she lives in law. When epistemic reflections are finally, if ever, brought to his or her attention, the student's guise will have already been sufficiently disciplinarised through style to only perceive the theoretical discourse as an incontrovertible confirmation of what he or she already knew more or less intuitively, that is, in the case of the civil-law tradition, law's apodicticity and all its associated presuppositions. The Romanian context provides here a telling illustration. Students are usually introduced to ideas about positivism at the philosophy of law course – an optional subject at most faculties that very few of them take up. And yet, at the end of their four years of study, they will behave, in their final dissertations as in their future research as PhD students, in the most positivist manner there can be, where I take positivism to stand for the proposition that the main scope of legal scholarship is to correctly identify what the law is on a specific matter and judiciously arrange legal materials in a coherent and systematic manner. I also take it to stand for the rationalist belief according to which these tasks of allegedly exact exegesis can be dealt with neutrally, to the exclusion of any references deemed not to count as recognised legal authorities. To come back to my example, by being exposed to ‘a brand of writing purporting to present itself in an unproblematic and unsituated mode’ (Legrand, Reference Legrand2017, p. 74), Romanian students become positivistically inclined even before theoretically discovering positivism – a doctrine that would commend to them, more explicitly, to ‘[banish certain knowledge] from the sphere of significance’ (Legrand, Reference Legrand2017, p. 74).

Law's readerly style reflects, then, not so much a conscious epistemic choice, but an epistemic mannerism. We can think here at the ‘indissolubly Freudian and Lacanian conception of the links between style and the unconscious’ (Arrivé, Reference Arrivé, Molinié and Cahné1994, p. 51). This involuntary acquisition of a specific epistemology through the imposition of certain stylistic rigors is not to be interpreted as forever precluding the advent of alternative epistemologies. It is, however, to say that the correlation between epistemology and style should not be underestimated. There are, I would suggest, good reasons to believe that changes in one will facilitate the emergence of changes at the level of the other. Whereas the perspective that draws an uninterrupted line from epistemology to style appears to be relatively unproblematic, its reverse, namely the view that alterations in style, to begin with, can impact on a discourse's background epistemology, is much less obvious. Upon reflection, though, this thesis seems to me equally convincing; let us not forget that, as the interpreter intervenes in a text, he or she instantly convenes a meeting between style and epistemology. If style shows up then more dressed up than usually, epistemology might feel intimidated and also want to change its garments. As Boyd White writes, emphasising the structural reciprocity between language and identity, ‘in important ways we become the languages we use’ and ‘in remaking our language we contribute to the remaking of our lives and character’ (Reference Boyd1990, p. 23).

Consider also the following analogy. When we learn a foreign language, it is not only new sonorities, new phrases, new words that we learn. It is also a worldview that is being appropriated (von Humboldt, Reference Humboldt and Heath1836/1999, p. 60; Whorf, Reference Whorf1956, pp. 212–213). Or, we need not have the entire language at our disposal; in other words, we need not fully master ‘its’ foreignness (is this ever possible?) before we can start articulating ideas partaking in this foreign worldview that would have simply been unconceivable for us under the linguistic structures of our mother tongue. Similarly, then, if we commence using words, turns of phrase, figures of speech and other textual markers not commonly employed in law, a shift in epistemology could eventually take place as well. And, as in the case of foreign-languages learning, lawyers need not attain Proust's literariness or Derrida's sophistication to actually be able to grasp realities about law that were previously inaccessible to them through the vocabulary prevailing in the paradigm of self-referentiality. I am not suggesting that changes in language will automatically drive novel knowledge into law. And, importantly enough, I am not asserting that this potential novel knowledge will necessarily be interdisciplinary. But I do claim that there is an increased chance that the shift from ‘the readerly’ to ‘the writerly’ will pave the way for more easily reaching law's extra-legal ramifications, all the more so that this domain seems to be too connected to everything else there is ‘there’, ‘in’ the world (Stolker, Reference Stolker2014), that is to the economy as well as to our psyche, to culture as well as to language, to religion as well as to history, to philosophy as well as to politics, to withstand interdisciplinary reflection if its language is demystified and allowed to receive this ‘other’ content.

At this point, I wish to refer to Boyd White's (Reference Boyd1990) critique of the ‘language of “concepts”’ (p. 22). This author points to the fact that many academic and expository writings are built on the assumption that

This way of naturalising our thinking is problematic, according to Boyd White, not only because it is untrue to our intellectual life (which presupposes a constant remaking of our concepts by human beings who act in communities of discourse), but also insofar as it encourages us to conceive of our own language as a metalanguage, ‘in which all propositions can be uttered, all truths stated’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 31). To resist this totalising vision will prove to be hard and complete resistance is difficult to even imagine. However, we might know ‘where in the effort to focus one's attention, and that is on the attitude we have towards the language we are using’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 77). Therefore, Boyd White invites us to exercise ourselves in cultivating ‘a literary sense of language’ by virtue of which we will come to produce texts that are

In other words, to use the vocabulary I proposed here, lawyers need to become aware in their scholarly writings of their writerly possibilities.

In the last section, I would like to pin down a number of more concrete strategies that lawyers could pursue in learning to write other/wise and address a couple of objections that I anticipate as possibly being raised.

4 Re/learning to write other/wise

I do not think it is possible to imagine a recipe, a list of discrete stylistic measures that would unconditionally lead to the writerly style and, finally, to the epistemological attitude – indeed, interdisciplinarity is a matter of intellectual posture, not of method, nor of epistemology tout court – that I advocate here. Thus, I do not adhere to an ontological conception of style for there is no such thing as a stylistic element in and of itself. The stylistic effect of words is necessarily afflicted by contingency. Indeed, ‘[n]o semiotic element has more or less of a vocation than other to constitute a stylistic mark’ and ‘depending on context, the one and the same element can or cannot function stylistically’ (Vouilloux, Reference Vouilloux2008, p. 198). Therefore, my suggestions are fashioned having in mind rather a certain ethos than specific stylistic options, which themselves might vary from one national legal language to another as well as from one legal subdiscipline to another.

Thus, legal scholars’ style should be reimagined to reflect at least three epistemic aspects of their research: (1) that it is theirs (that there is personal involvement in there), (2) that it is the result of a negotiation with others (with others’ view of reality rather than with reality itself) and (3) that neither the self nor the others – and irrespective of how many others speak with one voice – nor what ensues from the communication between this self and those others capture something beyond language and thus beyond reform.

First of all, lawyers should resist the temptation to write off the vagaries of language and be willing to be more personal (by including such markers as personal pronouns), more narrative as well, allowing ‘irony, ambiguity, and contrast’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 27) and eager to resort more to metaphors, analogies and other figures of speech in their discourses. This would remind us that law has always been more about speech and persuasion and therefore about the speaker's ability to ‘seize’ knowledge in an illuminating, even touching, way than about scientific methods and robust results.

Second, legal language should be richer in reporting verbs (i.e. verbs that refer the reader to supporting references) and other discursive markers giving away the fact that knowledge, at least in the social sciences, represents a product of the inherently selective human mind intervening, with all its prejudices and idiosyncrasies, in relation to others: ‘our minds, our questions, our sense of what needs to be said, of what can be said, are all shaped by interaction with others’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 16). Studies show that hard sciences contain fewer reporting verbs, since the authors assume more common ground with the readers (Hyland, Reference Hyland2004, p. 37). On the contrary, ‘reporting verbs fit more comfortably’ in the vocabulary of the so-called soft sciences (Hyland, Reference Hyland2004). Hence, law should abandon its scientism and, like the soft sciences, develop ‘argument schema which more readily regard explicit interpretation, speculation and complexity as legitimate aspects of knowledge’ (Hyland, Reference Hyland2004, p. 37).

Third, truth-claiming sentences should make way for more reserved arguments. As I have already emphasised, lawyers, not surprisingly, like to transmit certainty to their audiences. Therefore, they frequently employ what one refers to as boosting techniques – expressions such as ‘it is a well-established fact that’, ‘it is generally agreed that’, ‘clearly’, ‘obviously’, ‘of course’, ‘can only mean that’, which reflect a high level of confidence in the truth of one's assertion or in the beliefs of one's disciplinary community. While avoiding circumspection is not an uncommon attitude in academia, since ‘writers need to invest a convincing degree of assurance in their propositions’ (Hyland, Reference Hyland2004, p. 37), lawyers’ readerly style suffers in my view of overconfidence, thus foreclosing any significant reorientation towards other disciplinary discourses.Footnote ⁷ With Boyd White, I ask, then, ‘[c]an we become more fully conscious of what we, and our languages, leave out, and find ways to reflect that consciousness in our speech?’ (Reference Boyd1990, p. 21). ‘Can we be, for example, less assertive, less continually assertive, more open and tentative and suggestive in our style?’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 21). If we want legal scholars to produce writerly texts, susceptible of meaningful interaction with texts pertaining to foreign disciplines, we should invite researchers to tone down the peremptory character of law by inserting hedges in their speeches – that is, communicative strategies for reducing the force of statements (e.g. possible, might, perhaps). For instance, instead of saying ‘the loan contract has five main features’, lawyers could write ‘the loan contract has at least five main features’ or ‘the loan contract can be said to possess five features’, immediately suggesting that it is not the reality itself that they are depicting, but always a projection and interpretation of various data with which they have been presented.

This conscious reorientation of one's ‘stilus’ (Latin for writing tool) towards other stylistic possibilities is, of course, a particularly ambitious task. First, one needs to fully appreciate that ‘language has real power over the mind that uses it, even the mind that contributes to its reformulation’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 28). Second, even as lawyers become aware of the need for ‘the writerly’, they remain surrounded in their research by numerous other texts (legislation, judicial decisions and legal doctrine) that, we could argue, have to preserve their readerly character if they are to stay functional.Footnote ⁸ Or, in the absence of inspiring models, it can, indeed, be very difficult to operate change. This brings me to the first critique one could address to my argument.

One might object that ‘if one wished to kill a profession, to remove its cohesion and its strength, the most effective way would be to forbid the use of its characteristic language’ (Hudson, Reference Hudson1979, p. 1). Furthermore, generally, ‘one's life is not directly controlled by specialist discourses’ (Bhatia, Reference Bhatia2004, p. 158). But law does control most of our lives; hence, we might want ‘the readerly’ with its certainty, assertiveness, apodicticity. Indeed, the practising lawyer, be he or she a judge, an attorney, a legal counsellor or a notary public, is called upon to stabilise the meaning of legal texts with a specific purpose in mind. As such, he or she does not seek to open it up to those countless possibilities of interpretation one can bring to the fore when law is regarded dynamically, namely in its interactions with society. To the contrary, in such pragmatic contexts as judicial procedures, one expressly builds a centripetal discourse whose statements converge towards a single meaning that the attorney upholds rhetorically and that the judge asserts performatively. A text brims over with meanings and yet, at the end of the day, the acting-in-the-world-jurist needs to stop its perpetual movement. But, ultimately, are there any pressing normative considerations that would commend to the legal scholar to engage in the same quest for semantic fixity?

I think there are none. Intellectual life and the quest for knowledge are driven by curiosity, originality, honesty and, besides that, little else. Researchers in law have therefore no obligation to serve the professions and their connivance with practice has been, in my view, rightly decried (Jamin, Reference Jamin2012; Feldman, Reference Feldman2004; Thornton, Reference Thornton2004).Footnote ⁹ If there was in fact someone or something that they should serve, that would probably be society at large, by exposing both the language of legal practice and their own language to critique – indeed, ‘by finding ways to recognize its omissions, its distortions, its false claims and pretensions, ways to acknowledge other modes of speaking that qualify or undercut it’ (Boyd White, Reference Boyd1990, p. 26). Let us take the following example. A court decision on gay blood donation might advance, in a categorical, readerly way, as its main rationale for the outcome of the case the ‘public-health’ argument. A writerly investigation, in contradistinction, could point out how the language of the decision promotes stereotypical views about gay people as often engaging in promiscuous behaviour. Briefly, it could tell a much more complicated story than the judicial opinion. Thus, legal concepts such as the principle of precaution in public-health matters, for instance, presented in an essentialised, unilateral manner in practice would end up being refined in theory, in a manner, we must admit, possibly unworkable in the world of legal practice. Indeed, such a nuanced critique can be hardly imagined from ‘inside’ the readerly preoccupations of the legal field. Now, if the sociologist is authorised to write about it, I see no reason why the legal scholar should not, if he or she finds it intellectually meaningful. Here, the researcher's lack of the power that the legal practitioner usually holds converts into an opportunity. Certainly, the researcher will be obliged too, at some point, to halt the interpretative flux of his or her theories, but, as a reader, a rereader and thus a writer, of legal materials, he or she will have enriched the discourse with new dimensions. Interpretation is neither a method nor a set of rules but, as Friedrich Schleiermacher said, the art of building ‘something finitely determinate from the infinite indeterminate’ (Schleiermacher, Reference Schleiermacher and Bowie1838/1998, p. 124). This something finite and definite differs depending on the capacity in which the jurist performs: as a practitioner – in which case, the notion of ‘the readerly’ emphasises a specificity of legal texts, that of immobilising understanding for the purpose of tackling a technical issue – or as a researcher – in this scenario, the notion of ‘the writerly’ brings into focus the necessity for legal academics to cultivate a text's polytonality as an invaluable theoretical resource. Both endeavours are meant to take place in the name of an ideal of justice stemming, on the one hand, from the demand that law decide, resolve, rest the case no matter what and, on the other hand, from the goal of instituting a form of discourse that will allow the text to expose its multiple identities or, better said, will allow the interpreter to work a text's multiple identities. At stake lies the acceptance of and respect for diversity. The writerly therefore does not menace the readerly world of the practitioners, which can continue to fulfil its goals, but it allows the legal academic to ‘withdraw from her confused loyalties with the practice and to put herself radically into question in her interdisciplinary academic environment’ (Minkkinen, Reference Minkkinen2009, p. 179).

All this, admittedly, does not solve in any way the problem of legal education. What are then law schools for, if we are left with practitioners who need the readerly and researchers, who generally are law professors as well and who seek the writerly? The easy answer would be to say that all faculties transmit to their students simplified versions of what their members research and that, by definition, the process of disciplinarisation is a readerly, foundational one, generally conveying purportedly stable messages with a high degree of assertiveness. The more complicated response would refer to the question of knowing to what extent law faculties could integrate ‘the writerly’ and ‘the readerly’ by embracing a broad humanistic education (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2003) without betraying the legitimate expectations related to the efficient training of practitioners (Birks, Reference Birks and Birks1996). There are good reasons, I think, to further look into this middle-ground, ‘hybrid’ possibility (Dyevre, Reference Dyevre2016) and the concrete shapes it can take across jurisdictions. This is not the place to elaborate on this topic, but let me just hint to one such reason that can be synthesised as what Joseph Pattison called in Reference Pattison1977 the ‘great paradox of legal education’, namely that ‘the institutions which must produce the individuals who will play a vital role in nourishing and shaping society are, in large part, isolated from that society’ (p. 62).

My reproach concerning lawyers’ writing manners should not be read as a romanticised, elitist critique that would seek to make legal writing more elegant or beautiful. Though research in general and law in particular can certainly be perceived in terms of aesthetics,Footnote ¹⁰ I am not interested here in this aspect of style. ‘Burdened [as it is] by a prestigious aesthetic past’ (Bordas, Reference Bordas2008, p. 135), style has nonetheless acquired, besides its artistic and aesthetic dimension, a pragmatic value. It is its performativity that I am concerned with. In his pleading for improving legal style, Bryan Garner (Reference Garner1988) explains that ‘there is no style-less legal writing, only writing of more or less grace and adeptness, and belonging to different stylistic traditions and conventions’ (p. 104). My intention is not to push for a more graceful style, nor do I evaluate this concept, as Garner (Reference Garner1988, p. 105) does, in terms of exactness and clarity in the use of words. Quite to the contrary, since I assess style in relation to what it can do, that is, in respect of its capacity to unlock new epistemic doors and chart new disciplinary territories, I do not exclude the possibility that the language of research in law becomes more abstruse or abstract than it already is.Footnote ¹¹ Interdisciplinarity has indeed been associated with ‘stylish academic writing’ (Sword, Reference Sword2011, p. 8). However, I do not praise it on aesthetic, but on epistemic, grounds. Hence, I also favour the idea of ‘style as epistemology’ (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell1977, p. 145) and not as a vector of aesthetic values.

Denouncing the dreariness of academic writing in general, an author argues that

In concluding my paper, I would rephrase this statement to say that ‘academic writers can make a conscious effort to question, vary, and augment the signature research styles of their own disciplines – which often embody deeply entrenched but unexamined ways of thinking’ and thus they will eventually be able to ‘appropriat[e] ideas and techniques from elsewhere’.