The Legal Cooperative Principle: An Essay on the Cooperative Nature of Contractual Transactions

The well-known complexity andobscurity of legal English seem to excludecontracts from being regarded as communicativetypes of written exchanges. However, whenanalyzed in the light of Grice's CooperativePrinciple (1975), contracts could be construedas examples of communicative and cooperativeoccurrences on the assumption that some maximsof a suitable cooperative principle between theparties are observed. The aim of this essay istwo-fold: to assign Grice's theory to thewritten medium of English contractual exchangeand to prompt the Legal Cooperative Principleand it maxims to be followed by the parties toguarantee the contractual communication and toconfirm general expectations about how languageis used in contracts.