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MLP-1 — Controlled Legal Writing

MLP-1 is an open standard for writing legal text under constraint. It is published by Michigan Legal Publishing Ltd. and released under a Creative Commons licence. The full text, the conformance tooling and the change log are on GitHub at github.com/michlp/mlp-1.

The standard is at Issue 2, a draft for review. Comments and change requests are welcome.

The problem it addresses

Controlled natural languages have existed for decades in technical documentation. They work by constraining vocabulary and sentence structure so that a text is unambiguous, translatable, and readable by a non-specialist. Every one of them assumes the writer may exchange a hard word for an easier one.

That assumption fails in law. A legal term of art is not a difficult word chosen in place of a simple one. It is the name of a rule, and it carries the case law that defines it. Replace summary judgment with a quick decision by the judge and the rule is gone, not clarified. A controlled language built on substitution will therefore destroy the thing it is applied to.

MLP-1 starts from the opposite premise.

What distinguishes it

Terms of art are protected, not simplified. Paraphrasing a legal standard is a violation of the standard, not a service to the reader. Where a reader needs help, the term is preserved and a gloss is added beside it.

Ambiguity in the source is preserved and marked. A source that can be read two ways is restated so that it can still be read two ways, with the ambiguity recorded. Resolving it silently substitutes the writer's reading for the law.

Fidelity is verified rather than asserted. A restatement is not conforming because its author says it is faithful. It is conforming because a documented procedure was followed and its record can be inspected.

How the standard is organised

The standard sets out 79 rules and 11 general recommendations, in three parts and three annexes.

Part 1 — Writing rules. Eleven sections covering words; terms of art and defined terms; verbs, voice and modality; sentences; conditions, exceptions and cross-references; operative writing; explanatory writing; consequence statements; punctuation, numbers and word count; fidelity and restatement; and general writing practices.

Part 2 — Dictionary. A deliberately small dictionary of general vocabulary only: the verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and general nouns that form the connective tissue of a sentence. It does not attempt to control legal vocabulary. A list of approved legal terms would be obsolete on publication, because the vocabulary of law is open and courts enlarge it constantly, and it would tempt writers to swap a term of art for an approved near-synonym, which is the precise failure the standard exists to prevent.

Part 3 — Conformance and verification. The proposition ledger, bidirectional mapping, mechanical checks, version binding and review.

The annexes record where the standard diverges from controlled languages built for technical writing and why, a replacement table for legalese, and the change form.

Register tiers

Legal text is written for different readers, and the standard recognises four registers. The register governs how terms of art are handled, how long a sentence may be, and what must be disclosed.

  • R1 — Operative. Written for courts, and for the parties bound by the text. Terms of art are used without gloss, because the text is the law. Sentences run to 30 words.
  • R2 — Professional. Written for lawyers, judges, clerks and law students. Terms of art are preserved without gloss. Sentences run to 30 words.
  • R3 — Public. Written for self-represented litigants, journalists and the general public. Terms of art are preserved, and glossed where they first appear. Sentences run to 25 words.
  • R4 — Introductory. Written for readers with no legal background. Terms of art are preserved, and followed by a described equivalent. Sentences run to 20 words.

Text at the introductory tier must carry a notice that it is not equivalent to the source. Text at the other three tiers must not carry one, because at those tiers equivalence is required.

Conformance levels

  • Level 1 — Style requires Part 1, Sections 1 to 9 and 11. It suits original drafting, internal memoranda and reference copy.
  • Level 2 — Controlled requires Level 1 and the dictionary. It suits original drafting of operative text and house-authored commentary.
  • Level 3 — Verified requires Level 2, the fidelity section, and a completed proposition ledger. It is the level for any published restatement of an authoritative text.

A published restatement must reach Level 3. Nothing below it may be labelled a restatement or published alongside a source text.

Verification, and why it is the centre of the standard

A restatement is checked against a proposition ledger: the source is decomposed into the propositions it actually asserts, each is mapped to the restatement and back again, and the record is signed. A reader who has not seen the source then rebuilds it from the restatement alone, which is the step that exposes a proposition quietly dropped.

Failures are divided into blocking and advisory. A failure blocks where it changes what the text says. Punctuation and sentence length are recorded for editorial review and do not block. The distinction exists because a regime that treats a misstated obligation and a stray semicolon as equally disqualifying rejects sound work over prose, and teaches a drafter to weigh the two against each other.

Where the standard yields

MLP-1 is the residual authority, not the first one. Where another authority governs the text, the standard yields to it, in this order: a governing statute, court rule or code of construction; the drafting manual of the publishing body, some of which are binding by law; the legislative drafting manual of the jurisdiction; the institution's own style guide; and only then this standard. Where the standard conflicts with any of those, the higher authority controls and the writer records the conflict rather than resolving it quietly.

Tooling

The repository carries a conformance checker for the mechanical checks, a JSON form of the proposition ledger, and worked examples drawn from real court rules, including Georgia appellate practice, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 29, and a three-instrument Tennessee synthesis that deliberately exercises conflicting sources.

The checker runs nineteen checks. It has no independent view of the source, so it cannot find a proposition that the ledger never recorded. Decomposing a source is human work, and so is the signature on the result. The tooling checks the record, not the reading.

Jurisdiction profiles

Some rules turn on the jurisdiction. The repository includes a template setting out what a profile must answer. No profile has been compiled yet: each one is legal research, and an uncited answer would be worse than a blank.

Getting the standard

The standard is available as a PDF, an ODT and Markdown, all from the repository. Change requests can be raised through the issue tracker or the change form in Annex C.

MLP-1 and Controlled Legal Writing are trademarks of Michigan Legal Publishing Ltd.