What I Tell You Three Times is True: A Pragmatic Approach to Redundancy in Legal Information

This article looks to whether it is feasible to avoid the communicative blocks and barriers which citizens find when they deal with legal information. Although these blocks have been usually regarded to be inevitable (the 'inevitability' argument), the ICT revolution allows hope of some improvement by means of electronic information delivery. Until now, however, public electronic legal information systems have not succeeded in really easing or solving laymen's legal communication problems. This is because they are tightly attached to traditional legal visions that primarily focus on the electronic availability of legal documents and disregard the pragmatic element of legal information. The target of any model of public access to legal information should not just be availability, but comprehensibility. My major concern here is to show that the general theory of information, especially the notion of redundancy, may be both a fruitful tool to deal with these problems and also to overcome the presumed inevitability of communication blocks in the legal field. Inasmuch as the citizen's perspective is assumed, this article presents a pragmatic approach to legal information.