Search

The purpose of this paper is to examine accessibility in legal texts, in this case German tenancy contracts. Legal texts can use a citizen perspective or a court perspective (Gunnarsson 1982) and give preference to the understanding of the parties involved in the contract or to the judging by the judge in case of a litigation between the parties. On the one hand tradition demands that LSP texts are unambiguous, exact, economical (Fluck 1996), which gives them some conventional linguistic features, usually considered to make the texts difficult, on the other hand there is a legal demand that contracts must be accessible to non-professionals who have less knowledge of genre and linguistic conventions, and this may entail that legal language is changed accordingly. I wish to show what kinds of differences might exist between contracts between professionals and contracts between professionals and non-professionals if the text producer takes into account the lack of knowledge of the non-professional involved in the contract. My – mostly qualitative – analysis, on the basis of a model of analysis that I developed for these studies, shows that non-professional contracts are modified in linguistic categories (“lexis” and “syntax”) and in a content related category (“references and intertextuality”). The results provide knowledge about LSP and linguistic features of legal language, more precisely of different types of contracts, i.e. language in use. They can be used for didactic purposes in teaching legal language and also by language and law professionals for acquiring knowledge on contracts in relation to non-professionals. The paper will be presented in German. Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise: Lagtexters begriplighet. Lund: LiberFörlag (1982) Fluck, Hans-Rüdiger: Fachsprachen. Einführung und Bibliographie. 5. Aufl. Tübingen / Basel: A. Francke Verlag (1996)

This study provides an economic analysis of the post-War institutions of the European tenancy markets. Two representative types of market interventions are analyzed: the introduction of compulsory terms in the tenancy contracts and rent control. First of all this study offers a description and an analysis of the recent history of those institutions. The cases of Spain (as a benchmark), Italy, Finland and UK are analyzed more in depth, as examples of "big reformers" during the 20th century, in order to extract some general conclusions about the evolution of the European institutions in the last decades. Then the effects of those interventions are theoretically explored by adapting a model of tenancy markets (Basu and Emerson, 2000). The results show that the analyzed institutions potentially entail negative effects for the European tenancy markets. Those effects are consistent with the tendences observed during the second half of the 20th century in the different european markets.

We present a model with a monopolistic landlord and tenants with unobservable ability. In this setting, the landlord should use a wage contract to extract the full surplus due to ability since a share or fixed rent contract leaves some of the surplus in the hands of the tenants. We combine this issue with a standard moral hazard problem on the tenants' side, which argues for a fixed rent contract. A share contract is an optimal compromise between these two forces.

In diesem Beitrag wird die Fachsprachlichkeit und Verständlichkeit in deutschen Verträgen thematisiert. Der Beitragbasiert auf einer Untersuchung, die im Rahmen meiner Dissertation durchgeführt wurde. Sie trägt den Titel „Faglighedog forståelighed i kontrakter. En undersøgelse af sproglige forskelle i tyske lejekontrakter rettet mod henholdsvisfagmand og lægmand” (Larsen 2008) [Fachlichkeit und Verständlichkeit in Verträgen. Eine Untersuchung vonsprachlichen Unterschieden in deutschen Mietverträgen gerichtet an Fachmann bzw. Laien].Zuerst werden der Zweck und der Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung dargestellt. Danach wird auf das Dilemmazwischen Fachsprachlichkeit auf der einen Seite und Verständlichkeit auf der anderen Seite eingegangen. Anschließendwird das verwendete Analysemodell kurz präsentiert und die Analyseergebnisse erläutert. Schließlich wird der Nutzender Untersuchung kurz dargestellt.