comprehensibility of the law for the layperson. Conversely, the Judiciary
and other activities of professional lawyers also establish numerous
interpretational and legal sub-systems by their immanent formalism.
This, to a considerable degree, transforms the fundamental general
messages of legal acts into “legal esoteric a” . It is thus justifiably possible
to consider legal or judicial formalism, as one of the central constitutive
elements of the autonomy of the law. 16
Within the framework of legal formalism, special importance is placed
on legal language. Legal language adds to the high level of autonomy of
(modern) law. Naturally, legal language can never be completely
autonomous since it is always a sub-system of the general language from
which it takes the largest share of its formal and content-related
characteristics. 17 However, certain broader layers of the legal language
are distinctly legally specific. This means that other language systems
aspiring to express themselves through law (e.g. politics, economics,
morals) have to significantly adapt to these layers. This is a common
practice used by the state or other political authorities whom are aware
that a monopoly on the legal language is a powerful means of
maintaining a monopoly on power. 18 The difference between various
historical ways and the modern way of monopolizing the legal language
is that in the past (e.g., in the middle ages) authorities often denied the
public nature of the law or they arbitrarily and unpredictably created the
law. Conversely, in modem society, the public nature of the law is one
of its fundamental principles. But nevertheless, due to its extreme
extensiveness and complexity, the law remains to a large degree only in
the cognitive reach of legal, administrative, and related occupations.
Alongside all the above-mentioned and largely formal factors of the
relative autonomy of modern law, we should at least briefly point out a
key substantive, content-related aspect of this autonomy, the valuerelated tradition of the law itself. The specific tradition of the law is a
condition sine qua non of the autonomy of the law and its quality in
terms of values. Even revolution that forcibly and radically eliminates
some political and legal order at the same time always “assumes” some
other political and legal history, for example, the bourgeois instead of
feudal or the democratic instead of autocratic. Revolutions require the
parties to establish a new order, while either following the tradition of
- See Lempert, Sanders. 1990, pp. 410-419.
- For more detail, see e.g. Viskovic, 1989, pp. 25-3J.
- Viskovic, ibid., p. 125, is even of the opinion that the language of the law is more
exclusive and secretive than religious or political languages since it diverges from the general
language and general national awareness on a deeper level than the other two.
