Power and Complexity in Legal Genres: Unveiling Insurance Policies and Arbitration Rules

The purpose of the present paper is to unveil whether the power distance/textual complexity duality attributed ordinarily to legal language applies to two different documents which are widely deployed, interpreted and applied in the global scope of commercial trade and communications, namely Lloyd’s Institute Cargo Clauses and the London International Court of Arbitration Rules. In choosing two texts which are the direct product of the law-making machinery of the Common law system, but which are used internationally, we ultimately undertake to research whether opacity is really inherent to legal texts in English with an international scope of implementation. To scrutinise, illustrate and argue on the degree of difficulty and power distance (and the relationship between these two) in such legal instruments, the perspective of genre has been chosen as the most effective of instruments provided by current Applied Linguistics. Genre analysis permits to identify the genre or genres of a specialised professional community connected to the communicative group it comes from, the audience that receives it, the historical and cultural background and the extra-textual reality it aims to represent. The goal of our study, carried out through different levels: formal, discursive and, mainly, pragmatic, is to discern whether there exists any possible equation between power and textual complexity, and the consequences this entails for the understanding of the nature of these major international texts.