By Vijay Kumar

AB INITIO it should be said that there is a good prima facie case for simplifying the language used in courts as part of the civil law reforms. Lawyers, pro bono publico, should be much more straightforward in the way they speak pendente lite. Inter alia, hearings in camera or ex parte should be thrown out and hearings in private or without notice should be brought in. Plaintiffs should be replaced by claimants. Taxmen should not live in terror of writs. Instead they should tremble at claims. These Latin phrases cannot go on, ad infinitum and we cannot adjourn sine die.

There should be a fiat from the Apex Court or the Bar Council which traditional lawyers and judges should not feel as a casus belli or as an act of force majeure which defy restitutio in integrum.

But then the lingua franca of the law may be baffling to the laymen but that, surely, is part of its charm and all of its function. When I tell an officer that he can’t be "a judge in his own cause," the phrase has no majesty or even mystery. It would be more impressive if I tell him that he had offended the basic principle of nemo debet esse judex in propria. Phrases like sub judice or lis pendens have a forbidding ring to them which is sadly lacking in "pending litigation". Ultra vires is certainly not without authority of legalistic verbosity: If you translate habeas corpus, into English, there is a body missing..

All this could of course have a serious impact on a very old legal concept, derived either from the Latin feudum, the Old English feoh, or some say, the Frankish fehu-od, which most of us lawyers now know as fees and which comes mostly from interlocutory this, mandamus that, a few affidavits and a fair old quantum of res ipsa loquiturs. The distilled wisdom of centuries has made these magnificent documents. Can lawyers abandon this age old modus operandi and tell their clients what they've been up to in plain English? No we just can’t imagine this as the traditional Latin saying goes: Caveat feles obesus!

Well, how many of those phrases could you get? Greek and Latin would like to take a short break after this.