I gave up reading law at university because it made my brain hurt. It was partly a matter of jargon — the definition of non-feasance, the burden of proof required to demonstrate “testamentary incapacity”, the extent to which mens rea is the essential concomitant of the actus reus, they all contributed to a thudding pain behind the eyes. But it was more than that. The law, as we know, strives for clarity. It tends, however, to take the long route, veering off into lengthy sub-clauses, avoiding the distraction of commas, rarely using an affirmative where a double negative will do. Plain English it is not.

I produce as evidence the following paragraph from the Scottish Defamation Act of 1952, essential reading for all responsible journalists north of the border: “In an action for defamation in respect of words containing two or more distinct charges against the pursuer, a defence of veritas shall not fail by reason only that the truth of every charge is not proved if the words not proved to be true do not materially injure the pursuer’s reputation having regard to the truth of the remaining charges.” The meaning is there, of course, but you don’t half have to work at it.

This may be the reason why so many of today’s law students are failing to make the grade. It seems that candidates for legal courses at certain English universities are no longer reaching the required level of comprehension because their A levels do not provide a reliable test of ability; they will, therefore, have to sit an extra exam to determine whether they have the brainpower to stay the course. There are two explanations for this. One is the general dumbing-down of A levels, the other is that sixth-formers have not properly cottoned on to the peculiar demands of legallanguage.

That is certainly the impression given by the wording of this new test. Students are shown a written text and then asked a series of questions about it, with multiple-choice answers. The first is a dead giveaway. “Which of the following is an unarticulated assumption of the argument?” it asks. Only a lawyer could put it that way. It is a perfect example of what is known in the trade as obscurum per obscurius or obscuring by means of the obscure. A Black Watch sergeant once put it another way: “Bullshit baffles brains,” he explained to a nervous recruit. It is a familiar device in court. The idea is that if you ask a witness a convoluted question, he will be so busy working out what it means that he will not have time to come up with a convincing answer.

It also means that the dry precision of the law can be used to mean almost anything. That great legal satirist, A.P.Herbert, quoted a House of Lords decision in his seminal work, Uncommon Law, which ruled that “while treating former decisions of the House as normally binding, (their lordships) would depart from a previous decision when it appeared right to do so”. In other words, anything goes.

That is why the layman finds the law so baffling, “a mystery to the uninitiated, a snare to the unwary, and a red rag to the unhappy man possessed by reforming zeal”, as Herbert put it. He cautioned that anyone attempting to challenge a legal decision without proper advice would find the way barred by generations of arcane procedure. In other words, the law is a closed shop. Dickens’s portrait of the old Court of Chancery and the endless case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce showed how the common man could be ground down by the implacable progress of the legal system. “A sty for fattening lawyers on the bones of honest men,” said Thackeray.

But quick, a word for the defence. Not everything can be reduced to words of one syllable. Legislation has to be drafted to make it watertight rather than comprehensible to the ordinary citizen. Provided it is understood by the professionals, the rest of us are simply required to accept that justice is being done, if not seen to be done. The impeccable logic of Lord Hutton’s report has impressed his colleagues, even though it left the rest of us a little disappointed.

Sometimes, however, one wonders whether the language of the law has become so inbred that even the lawyers themselves are baffled. As Brian Garner put it in his Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage: “Legalese has . . . been a scourge of the legal profession. Thomas Jefferson railed against statutes ‘which from verbosity, their endless tautologies, their involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their multiplied efforts at certainty, by saids and aforesaids, by ors and ands, to make them more plain, are really rendered more perplexed and incomprehensible, not only to common readers, but to the lawyers themselves’.”

I wish the students luck with their new exam. But boy, am I glad not to be sitting it with them.

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