How Legal Language Silences: The Effects of Digitally Enabled Legal Prolixity

• In Event: Silencing Dissent

Abstract

There are more legal words in the world than ever before. Enabled by
digital technologies like cut and paste, legislatures routinely pass
laws too long for any single person to have read all the way through.
And we regularly consent to unreadably long click-through contracts
every time we update some software or buy something online. Yet more
words does not mean anything can be said. Every discursive system
enables some types of statements while discouraging others, not by
prohibition but by rendering them ineffective or unspeakable.
Following Riles’ analysis in _Collateral Knowledge of how
“legal aesthetics” had the unintentional effect of privatizing
financial regulation in Japan, this paper looks at ways that digitally
enabled legal prolixity have silenced public possibilities in cases
such as internet domain name regulation.

Author

• Thomas Streeter, Western University