On the Need for Interaction between the Legal and Linguistic Expert Communities to Increase the Effectiveness of Legislative Technology (Case Study of an Arbitration Case)

The article discusses the problem of increasing the efficiency of legislative technology, which is relevant in the modern domestic legal and forensic linguist expert communities, as well as issues of linguistic interpretation of legal text in the process of law enforcement. The work discusses the so-called controversial cases of interpretation of a normative legal act, when its content is interpreted differently by the participants in the trial, which creates obstacles to the effective operation of the legal system. This issue is considered based on collaboration of the authors - a practicing lawyer and a linguist expert - within the framework of arbitration proceedings. The exemplarity of the proposed case in light of the identified problem is due to the fact that the need to turn to special linguistic knowledge in this case was indicated by the court, which initiated the involvement of a linguist in the arbitration process. The need to obtain a written opinion of a specialist and subsequent clarification of its content in the courtroom is caused mainly by the peculiarities of the syntactic organization of the disputed text, namely the syntactic complexity characteristic of the Russian official business language. The article demonstrates the methodology of linguistic analysis of the text of the decree of the Ministry of Health, including the grounds to the choice of the proposed approach to the study of controversial linguistic material. The method of using linguistic knowledge in the judicial process and the place of the expert's conclusion in the general system of evidence in the case are shown. Using the material of a specific case, the authors identified the problems of modern Russian law-making technology, in particular, the discrepancy between the legal text and the requirements of consistency, unambiguity, clarity, and brevity. The focus of productive interaction between the linguistic and legal communities in the field of law-making is outlined.