Like the Communication Research Institute of Australia, the Centre emphasises layout, as well as expression, as an important means to improve legal communication. Brochures disdain the usual dense text of legal publications. By the use of differential headings, marginal indenting, blank spaces between different ideas and the adoption of simple rules, the Centre practises what it preaches. As one of its activities for 1993, the Centre sponsored a visit to Australia by Associate Professor Joseph Kimble of the Thomas Cooley Law School at Lansing, Michigan in the United States. The law books are full of judicial criticisms of legal drafting, including legislation.
Conferences resound with judicial invocations to simpler expression.
The judgment is so encrusted with the doctrine of precedent that it tends to be forbidding. To this must be added the suspicion and fear of changing time-honoured forms, and the multiplier effect of word processors, which, once programmed, are easier left alone, unreformed, than brought into the era of plain English. To illustrate his themes, Professor Kimble offered a number of examples of simpler legal drafting. The same examples have been placed before judges and other lawyers in the United States. Faced with the plain English version, and the standard unreformed text of various documents, judges consistently preferred the former by percentages averaging 85 per cent.